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Did you look at the io.open() function?
It's a new module in python2.6, but also the builtin "open" in py3k!
"""
 * On input, if newline is None, universal newlines mode is
 enabled. Lines in the input can end in '\n', '\r', or '\r\n', and
 these are translated into '\n' before being returned to the
 caller. If it is '', universal newline mode is enabled, but line
 endings are returned to the caller untranslated. If it has any of
 the other legal values, input lines are only terminated by the given
 string, and the line ending is returned to the caller untranslated.
"""
I suggest to try
 io.open(filename, newline="")