Re-initializing parent of a class

Question

I have become stuck on a problem with a class that I am writing where I need to be able to reinitialize the parents of that class after having created an instance of the class. The problem is that the parent class has a read and a write mode that is determined by passing a string to the init function. I want to be able to switch between these modes without destroying the object and re-initialising. Here is an example of my problem:

from parent import Parent

class Child(Parent):
    def __init__(mode="w"):
        super.__init__(mode=mode)

    def switch_mode():
        # need to change the mode called in the super function here somehow

The idea is to extend a class that I have imported from a module to offer extended functionality. The problem is I still need to be able to access the original class methods from the new extended object. This has all worked smoothly so far with me simply adding and overwriting methods as needed. As far as I can see the alternative is to use composition rather than inheritance so that the object I want to extend is created as a member of the new class. The problem with this is this requires me to make methods for accessing each of the object's methods ie. lots of this sort of thing:

def read_frames(self):
    return self.memberObject.read_frames()
def seek(self):
    return self.memberObject.seek()

which doesn't seem all that fantastic and comes with the problem that if any new methods are added to the base class in the future I have to create new methods manually in order to access them, but is perhaps the only option?

Thanks in advance for any help!

Answer 1

This should work. super is a function.

super(Child, self).__init__(mode=mode)