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Change a file type in Python?

+3 votes
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When opening a file, you'd say whether you want to read or write to a file. This is fine, but say for example later on in the program I change my mind and I want to write to a file instead of reading it. Yes, I could just say 'r+w' when opening the file, but what if I don't know if I'm going to do both? What if I have the user decide, and then later on I let the user change this.

Is it possible to do so without opening the file again and using the same file object?

posted Nov 30, 2013 by Majula Joshi

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1 Answer

+1 vote

In the general sense, no, but you may be able to abuse things terribly by calling __init__ on an existing object. The only advantage of that would be if you have multiple references to the file object, so normally don't - just close it and reopen. You can't change access/share mode on the file system without closing and reopening, so ultimately that's going to have to happen.

answer Dec 1, 2013 by Jagan Mishra
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