The reconfigure() method of TextIOWrapper class in Python

Overview:

The method reconfigures the encoding scheme, new line characters, error handling mechanism for encoding errors, buffering and write-through options of a TextIOWrapper object.

Example:

Without the reconfigure method writing using ASCII and unicode_escape would have been not easy. This Python program would have reported an error stating "UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode characters in position 0-6: ordinal not in range(128)" if the encoding was not changed to "unicode_escape" while writing the Japanese version of the "Hello World".

# Example Python program that reconfigures
# the encoding scheme used by the TextIOWrapper
# based on the input text
import io

# Open a text file and obtain a TextIOWrapper instance
f = open("multi_encode.txt", "r+", encoding = "ASCII")

# Multiple lines in diffrent encodings
line1 = "Hello World\n"
line2 = "こんにちは世界"

# Write using ASCII
f.write(line1)

# Write using "UTF-8"
f.reconfigure(encoding = "unicode_escape")
f.write(line2)

f.seek(0)
for line in f:
print(line)

Output:

Hello World

こんにちは世界