need to find (and distinguish types of) carriage returns in a file that is scanned using scan

Hope this is not too trivial
I am reading a large file using scan. 

In one part of this file there is a chunk of text within which i need to 
know the positions of line breaks. But scan seems only

An example of the file is:
"
a 0 1 0
bftt 020
cftt T 1 R

a 0 1 2 1 2
b 0 1 2 2 2
c 0 10 00 
"

so precisely i need in the scanned file in R to know where each carriage 
return is in the file so that i can then identify the text strings (i.e. 
a, bftt, cftt, a, b, c ) that immediately follow the carriage return

On a subsidiary matter, it would be very helpful if i could distinguish 
between Unix, Dos, and Mac carriage returns in the data file

thanks

i should note also, that the input file contains much other stuff and is 
not in the form of a table that can be read using read.table or other 
read version. Nor do i know beforehand how many elements there are in 
each line

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