Question: I am trying to remove text between these two delimiters: '<' & '>'. I am reading email content and then writing that content to a .txt file.I get a lot of junk between those two delimiters including whitespace between lines in my .txt file. How do I get rid of this? Below is what my script has been reading from the data written to my .txt file:

```
 First Name</td>

                <td bgcolor='white' style='padding:5px

 !important;'>Austin</td>

                </tr><tr>

                <td bgcolor='#f9f9f9' style='padding:5px !important;'

 valign='top' width=170>Last Name</td>

```

Below is my current code for reading from the .txt file which strips empty lines:

```
    # Get file contents
    fd = open('emailtext.txt','r')
    contents = fd.readlines()
    fd.close()

    new_contents = []

    # Get rid of empty lines
    for line in contents:
        # Strip whitespace, should leave nothing if empty line was just       "\n"
        if not line.strip():
            continue
        # We got something, save it
        else:
            new_contents.append(line)

    for element in new_contents:
        print element

```

Here is what is expected:

```
 First Name     Austin      

 Last Name      Jones       

```

Answer: 
You need to specify the Configuration Property set to Development

**/p:Configuration=Development**

```
cmd /c "path\to\msbuild.exe path\to\project.csproj /p:Configuration=Development/p:DeployOnBuild=true;PublishProfile=Development /verbosity:minimal"

```

By default Visual Studio will create the projects with two configurations:

Debug: This one should be used for development, it includes the DEBUG constant by default.
Release: This one should be used for production

You can also create custom configurations from scratch or based on Debug/Release, if you based a custom configuration "Development" in Debug, it will include the DEBUG constant, you can remove it manually from the .csproj file or right click the project and review the project properties.

Do not confuse the "Configuration" property with a PublishProfile, the PublishProfile is intended to create a Deployment package after compilation, you can use a PublishProfile combining it with Debug or Release.

If you are using web.config transformations be sure to update the "Release" or the custom configuration transform based on your needs.
The code that tells msbuild to "automagically" define the DEBUG constant can be found in the .csproj file in the DefineConstants element of the build configuration (see the following excerpt from one of my .csproj files):

```
<PropertyGroup Condition=" '$(Configuration)|$(Platform)' == 'Debug|x86' ">
  <PlatformTarget>x86</PlatformTarget>
  <DebugSymbols>true</DebugSymbols>
  <DebugType>full</DebugType>
  <Optimize>false</Optimize>
  <OutputPath>bin\Debug\</OutputPath>
  <DefineConstants>DEBUG;TRACE</DefineConstants>
  <ErrorReport>prompt</ErrorReport>
  <WarningLevel>4</WarningLevel>
</PropertyGroup>

```

You'll need to use a build configuration that does not contain it.