Programming is all about getting the computer to do the work. Is there a way to get Python to automatically close our files for us?
Of course there is. This is Python.
You may not know this, but file objects contain a special pair of built-in methods: __enter__()
and __exit__()
. The details aren't important, but what is important is that when a file object's __exit__()
method is invoked, it automatically closes the file. How do we invoke this method? With with and as.
The syntax looks like this:
with open("file", "mode") as variable:
# Read or write to the file