If it's a short file you could slurp the entire file and then split it however you like using regular expressions.
I'm not sure if you can alter it, but os.linesp holds the value that is accessed when file.readlines() splits lines. Conceivably, if it were set to 'FOO', 'FOO' would be used to determine the EOL string. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
