Designing socket messaging format

[Stephen]

I'm developing a program which sends messages back and forth 
between two servers using sockets.  The message format I've 
been given is "YYYYTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTT"

Where ~
Y is the message type, which in turn affects the message length.
T represents a text message. (eg. "Hello World"). Note that 
  it could also contain newlines (eg. "Hello World\nGood bye")



This was easy to build ontop of SocketServer ~

	import SocketServer
	
	class RequestServer(SocketServer.ThreadingTCPServer):
		allow_reuse_address = 1
	
	class RequestHandler(SocketServer.StreamRequestHandler):
		def handle(self):
			request = self.rfile.readline()
			print "Received message, %s" % request
			self.wfile.write("Received OK")
			print "Ending request"
	
	host = "127.0.0.1"
	port = 1111
	server = RequestServer((host, port), RequestHandler)
	print "SERVER : listening to socket [%s:%s]" % (host, port)
	server.serve_forever() 

However, the readline() makes it necessary to send a "\n" at
the end of the message. So, the message format becomes
"YYYYTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTT\n"

This introduces the problem that if any of the text 
characters (T) are a "\n", the message will be terminated
too soon. 


A previous post to CLP provided the following solution 
which looks out for a "\r\n" message termination string ~

	import SocketServer
	
	class RequestServer(SocketServer.ThreadingTCPServer):
		allow_reuse_address = 1
	
	class RequestHandler(SocketServer.StreamRequestHandler):
		def handle(self):
			request = ''
			while 1:
				line = self.rfile.readline()
				if line in (None, "\n", "\r\n", ""):
					break
				request = request + line
			self.server.request = request
			request = string.rstrip(request)
			print "Received message, %s" % request
			self.wfile.write("Received OK")
	
	host = "127.0.0.1"
	port = 1111
	server = RequestServer((host, port), RequestHandler)
	print "SERVER : listening to socket [%s:%s]" % (host, port)
	server.serve_forever() 


So, should the message format change to ~

YYYY\n
TTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTT\n
\r\n

Other than facilitating use of SocketServer.ThreadingTCPServer,
it seems that asyncore also looks out for termination strings,
and the "Python Sockets HowTo" infers that using fixed-length
for message termination is a bad idea.  So everything seems to
be pointing this way.

Am I correct in my understanding ?

Stephen