I think it would be useful to have universal newlines mode for open similar to Python. A short description of the mode for open from Python 3.6 docs https://docs.python.org/3.6/library/functions.html#open .

Lines in the input can end in '\n', '\r', or '\r\n', and these are translated into '\n' before being returned to the caller.

When writing output to the stream any '\n' characters written are translated to the system default line separator, os.linesep.

Currently this needs to be handled manually in Julia which I think is a bit annoying and easy to enough to forget.

So I suggest the following:

1. Add support for universal newlines to open as a flag to mode or a new keyword argument
2. Make universal newlines the default for methods reading from a stream and returning a string e.g. readstring, readlines, eachline