open() in binary vs. text mode

[John Machin]

Hal Wine <hal_wine at yahoo.com> wrote in message news:<3E7A80F3.3030303 at yahoo.com>...
> 
> P.S. if you know the file is a text file (but perhaps from 
> another platform), you can normalize the input string thusly:
> 	contents = open( "foo", "rb").read()
> 	contents.replace( '\x0d\x0a', '\n' )
> 	contents.replace( '\r', '\n' )

Or just [no pun intended] use the new (in Python 2.3) "rU" (universal
text format) ...

> Now contents looks like a native platform text string. (I _think_ 
> all the platforms that used LFCR as a separator are long dead now...)

What platforms used LFCR? I had to deal once upon a time with a data
source that provided files that used LFCR but I just assumed that they
were crazy ...