Suggestion from a personal email:

Allow FileType to accept encoding and errors arguments
and pass these as keyword arguments to codecs.open() instead of open().

The encoding and errors arguments are probably useful, but why would you use the codecs module?

Probably because the suggestion came from someone thinking about both Python 2 and 3. But given that this feature request can only target Python 3.3, you're absolutely right that there's no need to go through the codecs module.

Here's an attempt at implementing this (my first contribution). Some notes:

- I tried to keep `__repr__()` backwards compatible. It would have been easier to inherit from `_AttributeHolder`, but maybe this might break some things...
- I added some test cases for `__repr__()`, but that's it. I don't think there's any other sensible test to do, as we're really just passing stuff to `open()`
- not sure about the style, especially line breaks...

Lucas: You only added tests for the repr, you should probably test the actual new functionality, too.

OK, as discussed offline with Petri I'll put some tests to ensure that open() is called the right way (using unittest.mock.patch).

Alright, here's a version with more tests (unittest.mock is awesome!). I think it tests exactly what it should (and no more), i.e. that the arguments are correctly passed to `open`.

LGTM. Let's wait for Steven's comments as he's the maintainer of argparse.

Is there something I can do something to move this forward?

Since Steven is not responding, I think I can commit it at some point. Thanks for the remainder :)

The patch needs documentation, though, right?

http://docs.python.org/dev/library/argparse.html#filetype-objects

Right, good point. Lucas, could you fix the documentation too?

OK, I'll give it a try.

Added some documentation for the patch. Let me know what you think.

As per Ezio's comment, changed "l1" to "utf-8" in the example of the doc.

New changeset d5a0698a8354 by Petri Lehtinen in branch 'default':
#11175: argparse.FileType now accepts encoding and errors arguments.
http://hg.python.org/cpython/rev/d5a0698a8354

Committed, thanks for the patch!

I made little tweaks before committing:

- changed l1 to UTF-8 in the example (guess you mis-uploaded the latest version)
- changed the argument to 'replace' in test_r_1_replace
- fixed 3-space indentation to 4-space indentation in test_open_args

Sorry for the little glitches you had to fix, I wonder why I didn't catch them.
Anyways, thanks Petri!