Reading from text files

[Jeff Epler]

There are three solutions to this problem:
1. Don't use Windows
2. Only use offsets with file.seek() that were returned by file.tell()
3. Open the file in binary mode

Windows stores "\n" as a two-byte sequence in text files when written,
and then transforms the two-byte sequence into "\n" when reading, for
files opened as text files.

file.seek() on Windows only knows about raw byte offsets, though, so
if you know the first line of a file is "a\n", you can't seek to 2 to
get to the second line, because that line actually starts at byte 3
(The value .tell() would return after you read the first line)


Jeff