Introduction

I need to process a text from Windows which has lines terminated with Carriage return and a New line, which is “\r\n”, while in Python, it treat all the new line conditions, for example, for the following code:

        with open(fn, 'r') as f:
            for line in f.readlines():
                pass # handle line here

The line is always terminated with “\n” (at least in Linux and Mac) no matter if the line in the file is terminated with “\r\n” or “\r”.

This creates some problem for me as I want to search through lines and replace some characters, but I do not want to change the termination of the line, since the file handled needs to be put on git, and I do not want to see all lines are changed and I want to reserve the original format as much as possible.

Solution

        with open(fn, 'r', newline='\n') as f:
            for line in f.readlines():
                pass #handle the line here

Now the line in above code contains the ‘\r’ as well, since the ‘\r’ is not treated as part of the line termination.

The problem if above code is that it is not general enough, e.g. if line is terminated with ‘\r’, it could not handle, which is not my case.