Opening a UTF-8 encoded file with unix newlines ("\n") on Win32:

codecs.open("whatever.txt","r","utf-8").read()

replaces the newlines ("\n") with CR+LF ("\r\n").

The docs specifically say that :

"Files are always opened in binary mode, even if no binary mode was
specified. This is done to avoid data loss due to encodings using 8-bit
values. This means that no automatic conversion of '\n' is done on
reading and writing."

And yet, opening the file with an explicit binary mode resolves the
situation:

codecs.open("whatever.txt","rb","utf-8").read()

This reads the file with the original newlines unmodified.

The implementation of codecs.open and the documentation are out of sync.