Buffered converter for MySQL CSV exports done with \b\b\b line endings to work around MySQL's awful handling of embedded newlines. Extracted from larger MySQL->PostgreSQL converter so some of the variable names don't make sense.

mysqlconverter.py

import re
import sys


if len(sys.argv) != 3:
    print "usage: {0} sourcefile targetfile".format(sys.argv[0])
    sys.exit(1)

stage_first_filename = sys.argv[1]
stage_second_filename = sys.argv[2]

REGEX_LINE_ENDINGS = r"\x08\x08\x08"
BLOCK_SIZE = 1048576
read_buffer = ""
with open(stage_first_filename,"rb") as f1:
    with open(stage_second_filename,"wb") as f2:
        print "converting...",
	while True:
	    read_buffer = f1.read(BLOCK_SIZE)
	    if len(read_buffer) == 0:
		break
	    while True:
		if not (read_buffer[-1] == "\x08" and read_buffer[-3:-1] != "\x08\x08"):
		    break
		append_buffer = f1.read(BLOCK_SIZE)
		if len(append_buffer) == 0:
		    break
		read_buffer += append_buffer
            print ".",
	    f2.write(re.sub(REGEX_LINE_ENDINGS, "\n", read_buffer))
        print "done"