Anonymous file closing

[Duncan Booth]

Sergey Krushinsky <lunarium at comail.ru> wrote in 
news:mailman.845.1086940793.6949.python-list at python.org:

> Hello all,
> 
> If I need to read a string from a file and use syntax like:
> text = open(filename, 'r').read()
> ...
> is the file object ever closed?
> 
> With best regards,
> Sergey
> 
> 

Yes it is closed, but it isn't well defined as to exactly when it is 
closed. You can safely assume that the file will be closed sometime between 
the read returning and your program exiting.

If you aren't worried about portability, and you are using the C 
implementation of Python then you may find it is closed immediately but it 
is poor practice to depend on it.