[Python-Dev] CSV, bytes and encodings

[Antoine Pitrou]

<skip <at> pobox.com> writes:
> 
>     Antoine> The documentation is, IMO, wrong even in 2.x. Just yesterday I
>     Antoine> had to open a CSV file in 'rU' mode because it had Windows line
>     Antoine> endings and I'm under Linux....
> 
> See above.  You almost certainly didn't have fields containing CRLF pairs or
> didn't care that while reading the file your data values were silently
> altered.

Perhaps. But without using 'rU' the file couldn't be read at all.
(I'm not sure it was Windows line endings by the way; perhaps Macintosh ones;
anyway, it didn't work using 'rb')

I have to add that if individual fields really can contain newlines, then the
CSV module ought to be smarter when /saving/ those fields. I've inadvertently
tried to produce a CSV file with such fields and it ended up wrong when opened
as a spreadsheet (text after the newlines was ignored in Gnumeric and in
OpenOffice, while Excel displayed a spurious additional row containing only the
text after the newline).

Regards

Antoine.