Class destruction

[Robert Dailey]

Thanks; I'll give it a try.

On 8/22/07, Nils Oliver Kröger <NO_Kroeger at gmx.de> wrote:
>
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> Robert Dailey schrieb:
> > Hi,
> >
> > I'm wondering where the most appropriate location is to cleanup class
> > objects. For example, i have a file handle as an instance attribute in
> one
> > of my classes and I need to call f.close() on it when the class object
> falls
> > out of scope. Any ideas? I've tried __del__() but I don't remember this
> > working for some reason. I might try it again later just to be positive.
>
> __del__(self) is the perfectly right place for such cleanup ... it gets
> called once your instance is either deleted explicitly by you or it's
> handled by the garbage collector when there are no more references.
>
> The possible problem why this did not work four you is, that the
> destruction by the garbage collector cannot be predicted ... it may well
> take some time. If you try to open the same file from another class
> before yours gets cleaned you run into trouble.
>
> If you want to "reuse" the file, you will have to delete your classes
> instance explicitly using the del statement ... this will also call the
> destructor.
>
> The below code works fine:
>
>     def __del__( self ):
>         self._file.close()
>         print "File closed"
>
> Hope that helps ... Nils
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