I am creating a python movie player/maker, and I want to find the number of lines in a multiple line string. I was wondering if there was any built in function or function I could code to do this:

x = """
line1
line2 """getLines(x)

If newline is '\n' then nlines = x.count('\n').

The advantage is that you don't need to create an unnecessary list as .split('\n') does (the result may differ depending on x.endswith('\n')).

str.splitlines() accepts more characters as newlines: nlines = len(x.splitlines()).