File.open to support different encodings

[Tomasz Melcer]

Currently the ​File.open method has only a single parameter mode. mode can suggest opening a file in text mode. Then, Python's open will by default attempt to use the common utf-8 encoding.

It is a common pattern in a code base I work on to use the utf-8-sig encoding for CSV files, as this provides a slight improvement to user experience when opening the file in Excel. Right now, to create a file in this encoding using Django's File, we have to open it in a binary mode and explicitly wrap the file handle in a codec. It would be helpful if, just like the base Python's open function, File.open also accepted an encoding parameter, and pass it to the Python's open function.

[Tomasz Melcer]

I am willing to work in this feature, I'd like to just know whether it be considered for addition to the project?

[David Sanders]

Hi Tomasz,

Sounds like a good idea, though…

Not many people will see feature requests on the issue tracker so people are encouraged to start discussion in the Django forum first: https://code.djangoproject.com/wiki/DevelopersMailingList. This way more people will see the request & respond. One thing that comes to mind is that the File class could pass through *args, **kwargs to the open() function to avoid gatekeeping, though not sure whether this was intentional or not 🤔

The procedure is to close the ticket as "wontfix" pending further discussion on the forum, we can reopen when a decision is made to proceed.

[Natalia Bidart]

Reopening and accepting since there seems to be a consensus in the ​developer forum.

[SecondPort]

fixed : ​https://github.com/django/django/pull/17004

[abdulrahman]

Hey,

I can take this ticket if no one has time for it, I had to use io.TextIOWrapper to use a different encoding.

[Yves Weissig]

If there are no other takers I'm happy to clean up the patch and write tests.

[Mariusz Felisiak]

Replying to Yves Weissig:

If there are no other takers I'm happy to clean up the patch and write tests.

Thanks, please do.

[Yves Weissig]

Just a quick update, I'm on it, PR will follow shortly.

[Yves Weissig]

The PR is now ready ​here.

[Mariusz Felisiak <felisiak.mariusz@…>]

In 369b4982:

Fixed #34642 -- Added File.open() support for *args and kwargs.