Processes with strange behavoir

[Robert Brewer]

Markus Franz wrote:
> #!/usr/bin/python
> 
> import urllib2, sys, socket, os, string
> 
> # set timeout
> socket.setdefaulttimeout(4)
> 
> # function for loading and printing a website
> def myfunction(url):
>     try:
>         req = urllib2.Request(url)
>         req.add_header('Accept-Language', sys.argv[1])
>         req.add_header('User-Agent', 'Mozilla/4.0 
> (compatible; MSIE 6.0;
> Windows NT 5.1)')
>         f = urllib2.urlopen(req)
>         contents = f.read()
>         output = "\n---PI001---" + sys.argv[2] + 
> '---PI001---' + '---PI002-'
> + sys.argv[2] + '::' + f.geturl() + '::' + sys.argv[2] + 
> "-PI002---\n" +
> contents
>         print output
>         del output
>         f.close()
>         del contents
>         del f
>         del req
>     except:
>         pass

Question to anyone--are the 'del' statements above doing anything that
doesn't happen automatically when the function closes? I was under the
impression that such explicit statements were unnecessary, but perhaps
I'm unaware of some quirk.


FuManChu