According to the documentation, str.splitlines uses the universal newlines to split lines.
The documentation says it's all about \r, \n, and \r\n (https://docs.python.org/3.5/glossary.html#term-universal-newlines)

However, it's also splitting on other characters. Reading the code, it seems the list of characters is from Objects/unicodeobject.c , in _PyUnicode_Init, the linebreak array.
When testing any of these characters, it splits the string.

Other libraries are using str.splitlines assuming it only breaks on these \r and \n characters. This is the case of email.feedparser for instance, used by http.client to parse headers. These HTTP headers should be separated by CLRF as specified by http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec4.html#sec4. 

Either the documentation should state that splitlines splits on other characters or it should stick to the documentation and split only on \r and \n characters.

If it splits on other characters, the list could be improved, as the unicode reference lists the mandatory characters for line breaking : http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr14/tr14-32.html#BK