In file.writelines, the conditions in this if statement are bogus. If f->f_binary and AsReadBuffer succeeds (returns 0), AsCharBuf is still tried. So, for example, passing an array('c') to a file('wb').writelines fails, when it seems the intention of the code/comments was to have it succeed.

So, for example:
>>> f = open('blah', 'wb')
>>> f.write(array.array('c', 'test'))
>>> f.writelines([array.array('c', 'test')])
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
TypeError: writelines() argument must be a sequence of strings

While the comment in writelines says:
Check that all entries are indeed strings. If not,
apply the same rules as for file.write() and
convert the results to strings.

Thanks for the report and the patch! For a bit of trivia, this code has been there since 2000 (63ea2a2df06f).

New changeset db842f730432 by Antoine Pitrou in branch '2.7':
Issue #21350: Fix file.writelines() to accept arbitrary buffer objects, as advertised.
http://hg.python.org/cpython/rev/db842f730432

Unfortunately this caused a regression in unicode handling.  See issue 27154.