file read, binary or text mode

[Peter Hansen]

Ralf Schmitt wrote:
> "Terry Reedy" <tjreedy at udel.edu> writes:
>>On Windows, text mode autoconverts \r\n to \n on input and viceverse on 
>>output.  I believe that that is all the difference.  Period.
> 
> That's not quite the case. As always windows sucks big time:
[snip example with ^Z]
> The last character gets stripped if it's 0x1a when opening a file for
> appending in text mode. 

Good point.  Note for the picky: it doesn't just get stripped... it
*is* the last character, even if there's data following.  Or to
be blunt, ^Z (byte value 26) is treated as EOF on Windows when not
using binary mode to read files.

I suspect Terry and others (including I) overlooked this because
^Z is pretty much obsolete, and since few applications *write*
^Z as the last character of text files any more, almost nobody
bothers to remember that text mode is slightly more complicated
than just the CR LF to LF conversion and back.

-Peter