file read, binary or text mode

[Ralf Schmitt]

"Terry Reedy" <tjreedy at udel.edu> writes:

>
> Newbies, ignore this confusion.
>
> On Windows, text mode autoconverts \r\n to \n on input and viceverse on 
> output.  I believe that that is all the difference.  Period.
>

That's not quite the case. As always windows sucks big time:

$ cat bla.py
open("b.txt", "w").write("bla\x1a")
print len(open("b.txt", "rb").read())
open("b.txt", "a+")
print len(open("b.txt", "rb").read())

ralf at CRACK ~
$ python bla.py
4
3


The last character gets stripped if it's 0x1a when opening a file for
appending in text mode. I remember this from a posting on the metakit
mailing list. The poor guy corrupted his databases while he wanted to
check for write access:
http://www.equi4.com/pipermail/metakit/2003-October/001497.html

- Ralf

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