Stream objects have an explicit close() method, but what happens if your code has a bug and crashes before you call close()? That file could theoretically stay open for much longer than necessary. While you’re debugging on your local computer, that’s not a big deal. On a production server, maybe it is.
-
Python 2 had a solution for this: the try..finally block. That still works in Python 3, and you may see it in other people’s code or in older code that was ported to Python 3. But Python 3 also adds a cleaner solution: the with statement.
+
Python 2 had a solution for this: the try..finally block. That still works in Python 3, and you may see it in other people’s code or in older code that was ported to Python 3. But Python 2.5 introduced a cleaner solution, which is now the preferred solution in Python 3: the with statement.
with open('examples/chinese.txt', encoding='utf-8') as a_file:
a_file.seek(17)