--- /dev/null	Thu Jan 01 00:00:00 1970 +0000
+++ b/python/open.py	Tue Jul 30 00:05:46 2013 -0700
@@ -0,0 +1,16 @@
+def load(resource):
+    """
+    open a file or URL for reading.  If the passed resource string is not a URL,
+    or begins with 'file://', return a ``file``.  Otherwise, return the
+    result of urllib2.urlopen()
+    """
+
+    # handle file URLs separately due to python stdlib limitations
+    if resource.startswith('file://'):
+        resource = resource[len('file://'):]
+
+    if not is_url(resource):
+        # if no scheme is given, it is a file path
+        return file(resource)
+
+    return urllib2.urlopen(resource)
\ No newline at end of file