[Python-3000] [Python-Dev] Universal newlines support in Python 3.0

[Guido van Rossum]

On 8/14/07, Barry Warsaw <barry at python.org> wrote:
> It would have been perfect, I think, if I could have opened the file
> in text mode so that read() gave me strings, with universal newlines
> and preservation of line endings (i.e. no translation to \n).

You can do that already, by passing newline="\n" to the open()
function when using text mode. Try this script for a demo:

f = open("@", "wb")
f.write("bare nl\n"
        "crlf\r\n"
        "bare nl\n"
        "crlf\r\n")
f.close()

f = open("@", "r")  # default, universal newlines mode
print(f.readlines())
f.close()

f = open("@", "r", newline="\n")  # recognize only \n as newline
print(f.readlines())
f.close()

This outputs:

['bare nl\n', 'crlf\n', 'bare nl\n', 'crlf\n']
['bare nl\n', 'crlf\r\n', 'bare nl\n', 'crlf\r\n']

Now, this doesn't support bare \r as line terminator, but I doubt you
care much about that (unless you want to port the email package to Mac
OS 9 :-).

-- 
--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)