When I try to use indexing to get the last element of my line, it does not work( prints out a blank line). However, when I print the original line it works.
with open( newFile,"w") as f:
f.write("Model Number One" + "\n")
for l in lines:
if "ATOM" in l :
f.write(l[-1]) #Does NOT work, prints empty line
f.write(l) # Prints the whole linem when I only want the last element of the line
The cause might be that the line has a new line character at the end. If the last element of the line is a "\n" since the file has multiple lines, then it will definitely print a blank line.
Each line is a string, and so each index is a single character, with the last one being a linebreak ('\n'). If you want to get whitespace-separated substrings out of that line, use strip to remove the linebreak, and split to split the resulting string on whitespace:
with open( newFile, "w") as f:
f.write("Model Number One" + "\n")
for l in lines:
elems = l.strip().split()
if "ATOM" in elems:
f.write(elems[-1] + "\n")
As Kengru mentioned, there could be a newline at the end. To test try f.write(l[-2]) instead of f.write(l[-1]).
lines? Is it a list of strings or a list of lists of strings?linesis a list of strings, then eachlinlinesis a string, and each index is a single character. To split it into a list of whitespace-separated words you wantsplit().