Is there an easy way to get the type of line ending that the current operating system uses?
If you are operating on a file that you opened in text mode, then you are correct that line breaks all show up as '\n'. Otherwise, you are looking for os.linesep .
From http://docs.python.org/library/os.html:
os.linesep
The string used to separate (or, rather, terminate) lines on the current platform. This may be a single character, such as '\n' for POSIX, or multiple characters, for example, '\r\n' for Windows. Do not use os.linesep as a line terminator when writing files opened in text mode (the default); use a single '\n' instead, on all platforms.