Only the last line of a multiline file / string is printed

Question

I searched a bit on Stack Overflow and stumbled on different answers but nothing fitted for my situation...

I got a map.txt file like this:

+----------------------+                          
|                      |                          
|                      |                          
|                      |                          
|        test          |                          
|                      |                          
|                      |                          
|                      |                          
+------------------------------------------------+
|                      |                         |
|                      |                         |
|                      |                         |
|       Science        |       Bibliothek        |
|                      |                         |
|                      |                         |
|                      |                         |
+----------------------+-------------------------+

when I want to print it using this:

def display_map():
    s = open("map.txt").read()
    return s


print display_map()

it just prints me:

 +----------------------+-------------------------+      

When I try the same method with another text file like:

line 1
line 2
line 3

it works perfectly.

What I do wrong?

Answer 1

I guess this file uses the CR (Carriage Return) character (Ascii 13, or '\r') for newlines; on Windows and Linux this would just move the cursor back to column 1, but not move the cursor down to the beginning of a new line.

(Of course such line terminators would not survive copy-paste to Stack Overflow, which is why this cannot be replicated).

You can debug strange characters in a string with repr:

print(repr(read_map())

It will print out the string with all special characters escaped.

---

If you see \r in the repred string, you could try this instead:

def read_map():
    with open('map.txt') as f:  # with ensures the file is closed properly
        return f.read().replace('\r', '\n') # replace \r with \n

Alternatively supply the U flag to open for universal newlines, which would convert '\r', '\r\n' and '\n' all to the \n upon reading despite the underlying operating system's conventions:

def read_map():
    with open('map.txt', 'rU') as f:
        return f.read()

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