Prevent TextIOWrapper from closing on GC in a Py2/Py3 compatible way

Question

What I need to accomplish:

Given a binary file, decode it in a couple different ways providing a TextIOBase API. Ideally these subseque

Answer 1

Just detach your TextIOWrapper() object before letting it be garbage collected:

def mangle(x):
    wrapper = io.TextIOWrapper(x)
    wrapper.detach()

The TextIOWrapper() object only closes streams it is attached to. If you can't alter the code where the object goes out of scope, then simply keep a reference to the TextIOWrapper() object locally and detach at that point.

If you must subclass TextIOWrapper(), then just call detach() in the __del__ hook:

class DetachingTextIOWrapper(io.TextIOWrapper):
    def __del__(self):
        self.detach()