> Note that the problem with the read()+split() approach is that you
> either have to read the whole file into memory (which this RFE is trying
> to avoid) or you have to do your own buffering and so forth to split
> records as you go. Since the latter is both difficult to get right and
> very similar to what the IO module already has to do for readlines(), it
> makes sense to include the extra complexity there.

I wonder how often this use case happens though. Usually you first split
on lines, and only then you split on another character or string (think
CSV files, HTTP headers, etc.).

When you don't split on lines, conversely, you probably have a binary
format, and binary formats have more efficient ways of chunking (for
example, a couple of bytes at the beginning indicating the length of the
chunk).