> say one of the fields has an embedded \r. For instance "blahblah\r" is the
> value of the first column. Now open this file in text mode. What happens to
> this '\r' even before csv.reader sees it?

I used rarely the CSV format, but it sounds strange to have a newline 
character in a column. Newlines characters (\r and \n) are reserved to mark 
the end of the line. Can you produce such file to test? :-)

I guess that the csv modules does something like readline().split(";").