Python find() and newlines

Question

While editing someone else's abandoned Python script, I was trying to use

mystring.find("\n", i)

to get the index of the next newline in a string. But this consistently returns -1 (even when I try using "\r\n" instead of "\n"). I know there are newlines in the string, because I had just loaded it from a file. I am not very familiar with Python; am I missing something obvious?

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EDIT: Yes, I tried printing out the string. It looks something like this:

expirydate = { year = 1820 }
minimum = { 500 }
extra = { }

The person who originally wrote the script apparently decided that it's better to load the entire file into memory before parsing it.

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EDIT2: repr(mystring) looks like this (truncated again):

 expirydate = { year = 1820 }\n minimum = { 500 }\n extra = { }\n

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EDIT3: As some people suspected, I was misunderstanding the input. Apparently, it was actually searching in a substring of the full input, and the substring simply didn't have a newline. Unfortunately, this still doesn't explain why the script doesn't work, but it helps me get a little closer. I'm closing this question and voting up everyone who took the time to answer. :)

Answer 1

How are you reading the file? Some methods strip newlines when you use them. If you print mystring, you should have one blank line after it (which will mean 2 newlines).

Edit: What is i equal to? You probably don't need it there.

Answer 2

I think your i has a wrong value

>>> "one\ntwo".find('\n')
3

Answer 3

I am guessing you are trying to split file at new lines.

Python has a builtin function split

>>>txt = "My \n long \n new line \n delimited \n file"
>>>print
My 
 long 
 new line 
 delimited 
 file
>>> txt.split('\n')
['My ', ' long ', ' new line ', ' delimited ', ' file']