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I really like the way Robert 'UncleBob' Martin put it: "Every comment you write is a failure to express yourself well in code."

How are you going to express these in code:

"We have to trim the last character because this third party library we're calling has a bug that doesn't handle null terminators"?

Or "we have to continue to support the old-style url for backwards compatibility reasons"

or "we're dropping down to assembly here because it's 100x as fast as the naive solution"

or even "This function ensures the returned string ends in a line return."

First three are "why comments" so they are good. The fourth is not a comment. It should be clear from the code what it does.

You shouldn't need to look at the implementation of a function to know it's basic functionality.

So name your function "ensure_line_return"!

Same here, I'll update the article and add that in, thanks for sharing!