PEP 278 is something I (and I'm sure many others) have been wanting for a very long time. Now, in Python 2.3 (most likely), you'll be able to have code like
f = open(filename, 'rU'), and have ALL newlines in the file be the single, normal,
'\n' character. Of interest is the new file object attribute,
newlines:
A file object that has been opened in universal newline mode gets a new attribute "newlines" which reflects the newline convention used in the file. The value for this attribute is one of None (no newline read yet), "\r", "\n", "\r\n" or a tuple containing all the newline types seen.
This is especially welcome on "Mac OS X", as noted in the PEP, due to OS X's double standards - Classic and Carbon apps typically use the CR symbol to end a line, while Cocoa and Unix apps typically use LF.