Stripping Line Breaks in Tweets via Tweepy

Question

I'm looking pull data from the Twitter API and create a pipe separated file that I can do further processing on. My code currently looks like this:

auth = tweepy.OAuthHandler(CONSUMER_KEY, CONSUMER_SECRET)
auth.set_access_token(ACCESS_KEY, ACCESS_SECRET)
api = tweepy.API(auth)

out_file = "tweets.txt"

tweets = api.search(q='foo')
o = open(out_file, 'a')

for tweet in tweets:
        id = str(tweet.id)
        user = tweet.user.screen_name
        post = tweet.text
        post = post.encode('ascii', 'ignore')
        post = post.strip('|') # so pipes in tweets don't create unwanted separators
        post = post.strip('\r\n')
        record = id + "|" + user + "|" + post
        print>>o, record

I have a problem when a user's tweet includes line breaks which makes the output data look like this:

473565810326601730|usera|this is a tweet 
473565810325865901|userb|some other example 
406478015419876422|userc|line 
separated 
tweet
431658790543289758|userd|one more tweet

I want to strip out the line breaks on the third tweet. I've tried post.strip('\n') and post.strip('0x0D 0x0A') in addition to the above but none seem to work. Any ideas?

Answer 1

That is because strip returns "a copy of the string with leading and trailing characters removed".

You should use replace for the new line and for the pipe:

post = post.replace('|', ' ')
post = post.replace('\n', ' ')