getting values from a text file (newby)

[John Machin]

On Feb 2, 6:18 am, vsoler <vicente.so... at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> r: in the open statement, why do you use 'rb' as 2nd argument? b is
> supposed to be binary, and my file is text!

Because unlike Stephen, r has read the csv manual. Binary mode is
required to handle properly cases like '\n' embedded in a field --
something which can easily happen when the data has been extracted
from a database with slack data-entry validation.