As a newbie, I often couldn’t find information on file write modes, like rb, U, etc.
Python has great documentation…. open a python interpreter, type help(file) and you will see:
class file(object)
file(name[, mode[, buffering]]) -> file object
Open a file. The mode can be ‘r’, ‘w’ or ‘a’ for reading (default),
writing or appending. The file will be created if it doesn’t exist
when opened for writing or appending; it will be truncated when
opened for writing. Add a ‘b’ to the mode for binary files.
Add a ‘+’ to the mode to allow simultaneous reading and writing.
If the buffering argument is given, 0 means unbuffered, 1 means line
buffered, and larger numbers specify the buffer size.
Add a ‘U’ to mode to open the file for input with universal newline
support. Any line ending in the input file will be seen as a ‘\n’
in Python. Also, a file so opened gains the attribute ‘newlines’;
the value for this attribute is one of None (no newline read yet),
‘\r’, ‘\n’, ‘\r\n’ or a tuple containing all the newline types seen.
‘U’ cannot be combined with ‘w’ or ‘+’ mode.
Mmmm. Perfect. One of the reason why I like Django so much is the documentation. Freaking amazing! So many python questions have been self answered by just typing help( blah ).
Yuji Tomita 