Did you look at the io.open() function?
It's a new module in python2.6, but also the builtin "open" in py3k!

"""
    * On input, if newline is None, universal newlines mode is
      enabled. Lines in the input can end in '\n', '\r', or '\r\n', and
      these are translated into '\n' before being returned to the
      caller. If it is '', universal newline mode is enabled, but line
      endings are returned to the caller untranslated. If it has any of
      the other legal values, input lines are only terminated by the given
      string, and the line ending is returned to the caller untranslated.
"""

I suggest to try
    io.open(filename, newline="")