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Sorry for not responding in time to those questions.

My proposal was meant to provide the openfile method, and
provide the user with a way to override it and still use the
static infrastructure if the fileinput module, as
demonstrated by bz2fileinput.py.

Instead of using the hook "_FileInput" to provide a
replacement class to the module, it may be better to replace
FileInput.openfile() in derived modules, but I thought that
may be even more of a hack.

If you think this is worth following up, please advise of
the best way to achieve this goal.

Thanks
Stephan