The with open Statement in Python: Why and How It Cleans Up Your Code

Learn How Using with open in Python Makes File Handling and More as Easy as Pie — Without Breaking a Sweat!

Imagine This…

You’re sitting in a coffee shop, typing away on your laptop, and suddenly it hits you: You’ve forgotten your water bottle at the last table you were at. You hurry back, pool it and come back to your seat. But what if the bottle didn’t belong to you? Or worse, imagine if someone tripped over it ’cause you spaced out and forgot to clean up after your damn self?

In coding this forgetting — of closing a file (or some other resource) after opening it — can create similar chaos — unreadable files, blocked programs as well as memory leaks.

That is where Python’s with open statement comes into play. It’s like having a really kind helper who makes sure all is tidy when you’re done with anything, no matter what.

What Is with open? Why Do You Care?

If you’ve ever written code that opens a file, you may have seen something like this:

file = open("example.txt", "r")  
content = file.read()  
file.close()  # Don’t forget this!