So, do yourself and to us, "the rest of the world", a favor, and open the file in binary mode. 

Also, I'd suggest you and anyone being picky about encoding to read http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html so you can finally have in your mind that *** ASCII is not text *** .

It used to be text when to get to non-[A-Z|a-z] text you had to have someone recording a file in  a tape, pack it in the luggage, and take a plane to "overseas" to the U.S.A. . That is not the case anymore, and that, as far as I understand, is the reasoning to Python 3 to default to unicode. 

Anyone can work "ignoring text" and treating bytes as bytes, opening a file in binary mode. You can use "os.linesep" instead of a hard-coded "\n" to overcome linebreaking. (Of course you might accidentally break a line inside a multi-byte character in some enconding, since you prefer to ignore them altogether, but it should be rare).

  js

 -><-