It looks like I’m not the first one stumbling over this, but I just had a lot of fun trying to figure out why a moderately complex binary protocol sometimes randomly failed to work when sent through a subprocess stdout pipe. Apparently, because Python opens Windows stdout in text mode, something like “x0A” ended up as “x0Dx0A” on the receiving end.

Even worse, when trying to debug it by dumping stuff to files, I forgot to open those in binary mode too, which made things even more confusing 😉

Here’s the solution:

if sys.platform == "win32":
    import os, msvcrt
    msvcrt.setmode(sys.stdout.fileno(), os.O_BINARY)