Do I have to do StringIO.close()?

Question

Some code:

import cStringIO

def f():
    buffer = cStringIO.StringIO()
    buffer.write(\'something\')
    return buffer.getvalue()

The docume

Answer 1

From the source:

class StringIO:
    ...
    def close(self):
        """Free the memory buffer.
        """
        if not self.closed:
            self.closed = True
            del self.buf, self.pos

So StringIO.close just frees the memory buffer deleting references to StringIO.buf and StringIO.pos. But if self is garbage collected, its attributes will also be garbage collected, having the same effect as StringIO.close.