[Tutor] removing line ends from Word text files

[Christian Meesters]

Hi

Right now I have the problem that I want to remove the MS Word line end 
token from text files: When saving a text file as 'text only' line ends 
are displayed as '^M' in a shell (SGI IRIX (tcsh) and Mac (tcsh or 
bash)). I want to get rid of these elements for further processing of 
the file and have no idea how to access them in a Python script. Any 
idea how to replace the '^M' against a simple '\n'? (I already tried 
'\r\n' and various other combinations of characters, but apparently all 
aren't '^M'.) '^M' is one character.

As supplementary information: I'm using MacOSX (version 10.3.4) with 
Python 2.3 or SGI Irix with Python 2.1.1 .

Thanks a lot in advance,
Christian