Python: Replace, rstrip() not able to remove newlines

Question

I've got a spreadsheet of information (UTF-8 CSV file being read in by the csv module) that contains information for a large number of products that need to go into an inventory db. I'm trying to setup descriptions from newlined rows of text to a html list tags.

The issue I'm having is that the following lines fail to replace the newline character in the string:

line[2] = "<ul><li>" + line[2]
line[2].replace('\n', '</li><li>')
line[2] += "</li></ul>"

The string continues to contain newline characters even when the second line is replaced by:

line[2] = line[2].rstrip()

What is going on, and what am I messing up? =)

Answer 1

From python manual

str.replace(old, new[, count])
Return a copy of the string with all occurrences of substring old replaced by new. If the optional argument count is given, only the first count occurrences are replaced.

As you can see, it doesn't replace "in place", instead, try:

line[2] = "<ul><li>" + line[2]
line[2] = line[2].replace('\n', '</li><li>')
line[2] += "</li></ul>"

Answer 2

Replace isn't in place.

So do

line[2] = "<ul><li>" + line[2].replace('\n', '</li><li>') + "</li></ul>"