string - In Python 2.4, how can I strip out characters after ';'?

Question

Let's say I'm parsing a file, which uses ; as the comment character. I don't want to parse comments. So if I a line looks like this:

example.com.              600     IN      MX      8 s1b9.example.net ; hello!

Is there an easier/more-elegant way to strip chars out other than this:

rtr = ''
for line in file:
    trig = False
    for char in line:
        if not trig and char != ';':
            rtr += char
        else:
            trig = True
    if rtr[max(rtr)] != '
':
        rtr += '
'

question from:https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1178335/in-python-2-4-how-can-i-strip-out-characters-after

Answer 1

I'd recommend saying

line.split(";")[0]

which will give you a string of all characters up to but not including the first ";" character. If no ";" character is present, then it will give you the entire line.