You have to print it:
In [22]: "\n".join(['I', 'would', 'expect', 'multiple', 'lines'])
Out[22]: 'I\nwould\nexpect\nmultiple\nlines'
In [23]: print "\n".join(['I', 'would', 'expect', 'multiple', 'lines'])
I
would
expect
multiple
lines
You forgot to print
the result. What you get is the P
in RE(P)L
and not the actual printed result.
In Py2.x you should so something like
>>> print "\n".join(['I', 'would', 'expect', 'multiple', 'lines'])
I
would
expect
multiple
lines
and in Py3.X, print is a function, so you should do
print("\n".join(['I', 'would', 'expect', 'multiple', 'lines']))
Now that was the short answer. Your Python Interpreter, which is actually a REPL, always displays the representation of the string rather than the actual displayed output. Representation is what you would get with the repr
statement
>>> print repr("\n".join(['I', 'would', 'expect', 'multiple', 'lines']))
'I\nwould\nexpect\nmultiple\nlines'
You need to print
to get that output.
You should do
>>> x = "\n".join(['I', 'would', 'expect', 'multiple', 'lines'])
>>> x # this is the value, returned by the join() function
'I\nwould\nexpect\nmultiple\nlines'
>>> print x # this prints your string (the type of output you want)
I
would
expect
multiple
lines
When you print it with this print 'I\nwould\nexpect\nmultiple\nlines'
you would get:
I
would
expect
multiple
lines
The \n
is a new line character specially used for marking END-OF-TEXT. It signifies the end of the line or text. This characteristics is shared by many languages like C, C++ etc.
Source: Stackoverflow.com