file read : feature or bug ?

[Jeff Epler]

On Tue, Apr 15, 2003 at 06:51:47PM +0200, Asbuilt Easynet wrote:
> But is there a workaround ?

Yes, kinda.

> > When you're using text files, seek will not operate as you expect.  The
                      ^^^^
If you open your file in binary (f = open(filename, "rb")) you'll be
able to use seek() in the way you expect.  *BUT* "newline translation"
is also not performed.  This means that if you wrote a text file on
Windows (opened in "w" mode) you will see the byte sequence '\r\n' where
you wrote a newline before.  On platforms with even more bizarre ideas
of what makes a "text file", you could get even stranger things, but
nobody uses those anymore, anyway.  Remember, "all the world's a vax".

I don't exactly remember how your program worked, but you can also use
the advice to only use a value returned from the tell() method when
seeking in a file.  This is actually guaranteed (by the C language
standard) to work and do what you'd expect.

Jeff