How can I detect DOS line breaks in a file?

Question

I have a bunch of files. Some are Unix line endings, many are DOS. I\'d like to test each file to see if if is dos formatted, before I switch the line endings.

How

Answer 1

(Python 2 only:) If you just want to read text files, either DOS or Unix-formatted, this works:

print open('myfile.txt', 'U').read()

That is, Python's "universal" file reader will automatically use all the different end of line markers, translating them to "\n".

http://docs.python.org/library/functions.html#open

(Thanks handle!)