# 6 PEP 278: Universal Newline Support

The three major operating systems used today are Microsoft Windows, Apple's Macintosh OS, and the various Unix derivatives. A minor irritation of cross-platform work is that these three platforms all use different characters to mark the ends of lines in text files. Unix uses the linefeed (ASCII character 10), MacOS uses the carriage return (ASCII character 13), and Windows uses a two-character sequence of a carriage return plus a newline.

Python's file objects can now support end of line conventions other than the one followed by the platform on which Python is running. Opening a file with the mode `'U'` or `'rU'` will open a file for reading in universal newline mode. All three line ending conventions will be translated to a "`\n`" in the strings returned by the various file methods such as `read()` and `readline()`.

Universal newline support is also used when importing modules and when executing a file with the `execfile()` function. This means that Python modules can be shared between all three operating systems without needing to convert the line-endings.

This feature can be disabled when compiling Python by specifying the --without-universal-newlines switch when running Python's configure script.

See Also:

PEP 278, Universal Newline Support
  Written and implemented by Jack Jansen.