Python 3 Object-Oriented Programming - Third Edition

Placing it in context

The need to close files when we are finished with them can make our code quite ugly. Because an exception may occur at any time during file I/O, we ought to wrap all calls to a file in a try...finally clause. The file should be closed in the finally clause, regardless of whether I/O was successful. This isn't very Pythonic. Of course, there is a more elegant way to do it.

If we run dir on a file-like object, we see that it has two special methods named __enter__ and __exit__. These methods turn the file object into what is known as a context manager. Basically, if we use a special syntax called the with statement, these methods will be called before and after nested code is executed. On file objects, the __exit__ method ...