Blank lines on text box widget - windows

Question

I have an issue with getting the contents of a tkinter text box. If I paste information into it from Excel (for example), it always adds an empty line at the bottom. I would like to remove that line automatically. This is what I use to get the contents:
contents = inputText.get(1.0, "end-1c")
for line in contents.split("\n"):
line = line.strip()
I initially added a '[:-1]' on the end of that, which works, but only on text that is pasted into the text box. If you type text in manually, then obviously there's no trailing '\n' on the end, so it ends up removing the last character that was typed. Not good!
How can I get it to remove (or ignore) the trailing empty lines? The 'line = line.strip()' in the code further down seems to have no effect.
Thanks, Chris.

Answer 1

Your problem isn't with getting the text, your problem is that pasting seems to add more than you expect. To get text, regardless of how it ended up in the widget, you should use .get("1.0", "end-1c"). There is simply no way to know at the time you are getting the contents of the widget if any extra newlines came from the user directly or from a paste operation. To tkinter, text is text no matter how it was entered.
The only solution is to adjust the paste binding, and even that is problematic because I don't think tkinter has any way of knowing if the clipboard contents are from excel, or from some other source.
If all you really want is to ignore all trailing blank lines, call strip() on the data before calling split("\n")

Answer 2

Textbox was always inserts a blank line at the end. The problem was compounded when editing textbox and yet another blank line was inserted. However during edit you could remove blank lines so you can't use "end-1c" all the time.
The trick was to remove 1 or more extra blank lines after editing:
# Rebuild lyrics from textbox
self.work_lyrics_score = \
self.lyrics_score_box.get('1.0', tk.END)
while self.work_lyrics_score.endswith('\n\n'):
# Drop last blank line which textbox automatically inserts.
# User may have manually deleted during edit so don't always assume
self.work_lyrics_score = self.work_lyrics_score[:-1]
Note however this is with Linux. For Windows you might need something like:
while self.work_lyrics_score.endswith('\n\r\n\r'):
# Drop last blank line which textbox automatically inserts.
# User may have manually deleted during edit so don't always assume
self.work_lyrics_score = self.work_lyrics_score[:-2]
Or whatever the the control code is for DOS/Windows LF/CR (Line Feed / Carriage Return) typewriter days style is.