closed attribute will confirm that the file is closed.
-with StatementFIXME "with open(...) as file" pattern +
File 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.
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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.
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with open('examples/chinese.txt', encoding='utf-8') as a_file:
+ a_file.seek(17)
+ a_character = a_file.read(1)
+ print(a_character)This code calls open(), but it never calls a_file.close(). The with statement starts a code block, like an if statement or a for loop. Inside this code block, you can use the variable a_file as the file object returned from the call to open(). All the regular file object methods are available — seek(), read(), whatever you need. When the with block ends, Python calls a_file.close() method automatically.
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FIXME other with examples