Add splitlines?

[mpastell]

I think it would be useful to have a splitlines method similar to Python

Return a list of the lines in the string, breaking at line boundaries. Line breaks are not included in the resulting list unless keepends is given and true.

https://docs.python.org/3/library/stdtypes.html?highlight=splitlines .

I think it would be convenient, at least for me I very often process strings line by line. And it would be useful in order to avoid bugs related to \ron Windows.

[oscardssmith]

Possibly more useful would be a way to iterate by line, as split lines only works well for small files. (Both would be cool too)

[mpastell]

There is eachline, but it keeps the line endings and doesn't currently work for in memory strings. I think adding splitlines in addition to that would be useful. And give eachline the option not to include line breaks in the output.

[giordano]

What is the difference with split?

If you are only interested in removing leading and trailing whitespaces, there is also strip (and lstrip and rstrip).

[mpastell]

The difference to to split is automatically handling \r\n and \n as linefeed. The first implementation that comes to mind would be:

split(string, r"\n|\r\n")

The corresponding function in Python also handles several other linefeed formats and it could be wise to do the same. I recently had few bugs in Weave.jl due to not handling \r(I just did split(s, "\n") ) and I suspect that others not using Julia on Windows regularly might do the same.

Using rstrip when parsing formats with significant whitespace is not a good idea. There is also chomp, but it doesn't remove trailing \r.

[giordano]

I'd say that there is no need for a new function (split is just fine), but to improve handling of newlines (and this is the topic of #19785), right? If so, this ticket can be closed.

[mpastell]

I think splitlines contributes to improved handling of newlines and it would be nice to have it similarly as you have both print and println, readlines and eachline etc. Many languages have both split and splitlines e.g. Python, Ruby and Clojure.

[giordano]

I see your point now, thanks for clarifying it.

[mpastell]

After #19944 gets merged this could simply be defined as

splitlines(str::String, chomp::Bool=true) = readlines(IOBuffer(str), chomp))

[laborg]

This issue can be closed: eachline and readline have a keep keyword since #20203 was merged.