file.seek misbehaving?

[Gordon McMillan]

cheesecake <vigenereNOviSPAM at leland.stanford.edu.invalid> 
wrote:
>
>I've run into a problem that is perhaps not a Python-specific
>bug. I was processing some log files using Python, when I
>noticed some mysterious bugs in certain files. I tracked down
>the problem to the seek method misbehaving.

[big snip]

Nope, it's not Python's problem. You can't reliably seek on a file 
opened in text mode (on Windows). You'll get the same (bad) results 
working in C.

If I were you, I'd open the file in binary mode (so seek and tell work 
properly) and deal with line endings explicitly.

- Gordon