Easiest way to ignore blank lines when reading a file in Python

If you want you can just put what you had in a list comprehension:

names_list = [line for line in open("names.txt", "r").read().splitlines() if line]

or

all_lines = open("names.txt", "r").read().splitlines()
names_list = [name for name in all_lines if name]

splitlines() has already removed the line endings.

I don't think those are as clear as just looping explicitly though:

names_list = []
with open('names.txt', 'r') as _:
    for line in _:
        line = line.strip()
        if line:
            names_list.append(line)

Edit:

Although, filter looks quite readable and concise:

names_list = filter(None, open("names.txt", "r").read().splitlines())

I guess there is a simple solution which I recently used after going through so many answers here.

with open(file_name) as f_in:   
    for line in f_in:
        if len(line.split()) == 0:
            continue

This just does the same work, ignoring all empty line.

You could use list comprehension:

with open("names", "r") as f:
    names_list = [line.strip() for line in f if line.strip()]

Updated: Removed unnecessary readlines().

To avoid calling line.strip() twice, you can use a generator:

names_list = [l for l in (line.strip() for line in f) if l]

I would stack generator expressions:

with open(filename) as f_in:
    lines = (line.rstrip() for line in f_in) # All lines including the blank ones
    lines = (line for line in lines if line) # Non-blank lines

Now, lines is all of the non-blank lines. This will save you from having to call strip on the line twice. If you want a list of lines, then you can just do:

with open(filename) as f_in:
    lines = (line.rstrip() for line in f_in) 
    lines = list(line for line in lines if line) # Non-blank lines in a list

You can also do it in a one-liner (exluding with statement) but it's no more efficient and harder to read:

with open(filename) as f_in:
    lines = list(line for line in (l.strip() for l in f_in) if line)

Update:

I agree that this is ugly because of the repetition of tokens. You could just write a generator if you prefer:

def nonblank_lines(f):
    for l in f:
        line = l.rstrip()
        if line:
            yield line

Then call it like:

with open(filename) as f_in:
    for line in nonblank_lines(f_in):
        # Stuff

update 2:

with open(filename) as f_in:
    lines = filter(None, (line.rstrip() for line in f_in))

and on CPython (with deterministic reference counting)

lines = filter(None, (line.rstrip() for line in open(filename)))

In Python 2 use itertools.ifilter if you want a generator and in Python 3, just pass the whole thing to list if you want a list.