topic Re: Python Carriage Returns/New Line in Python Questions

Python Carriage Returns/New Line

MikeMacRae — Tue, 17 May 2011 17:14:28 GMT

Hey everyone. I've been pouring through the internet to try to find an example to use carriage returns in a python script. (i.e. vbnewline from vb)

In my script example below I am cycling through the text elements in a series of maps and replacing any of them that contain the text "TITLE BLOCK" with a string composed of variables that read from a look up table.

As you can see I want the first variable to sit on the first line, the second to sit on the second line and so forth.

textElement.text = firstline + '/n' + secondline + '/n' + thirdlinea + " " + thirdlineb

Using the /n new line function, it's supposed to return the next variable to a new line. This is not working for me. I have tried a number of different ways and I either get an error message or all the texts gets placed into the text element box, but it all sits on one line. Does anyone suggest a workaround?

Thanks,
Mike

for textElement in arcpy.mapping.ListLayoutElements(mxd2, "TEXT_ELEMENT"):
if textElement.text == "TITLE BLOCK":
                        #print row.SITE
                  textElement.text = firstline + '/n' + secondline + '/n' + thirdlinea + " " + thirdlineb

Re: Python Carriage Returns/New Line

MathewCoyle — Tue, 17 May 2011 17:36:44 GMT

I think you need "\n"

Re: Python Carriage Returns/New Line

DanPatterson_Retired — Tue, 17 May 2011 17:52:22 GMT

www.python.org has the official documentation, look for "escape characters" within the string section Books by O'Reilly serve as good hardcopy companions to the web documents that exist.

Re: Python Carriage Returns/New Line

MikeMacRae — Tue, 17 May 2011 20:03:07 GMT

Thanks for the input people. This was definitely a brain stump on my part. My sytax is correct except I used forward slashes instead of back slashes....so it should have been '\n' instead of '/n'

Dan, thanks for the reference. It was there, that I recognized my problem.

Mike