As Eric said. Please see the socket.makefile doc:

“Return a file object associated with the socket. The exact returned type depends on the arguments given to makefile(). These arguments are interpreted the same way as by the built-in open() function.”

(http://docs.python.org/py3k/library/socket.html#socket.socket.makefile)

And in turn, the built-in open() function des cribes the `newline` parameters, which sets whether newline characters are translated.