open read and close a file in 1 line of code

Question

Now I use:

pageHeadSectionFile = open(\'pagehead.section.htm\',\'r\')
output = pageHeadSectionFile.read()
pageHeadSectionFile.close()

But t

Answer 1

What you can do is to use the with statement, and write the two steps on one line:

>>> with open('pagehead.section.htm', 'r') as fin: output = fin.read();
>>> print(output)
some content

The with statement will take care to call __exit__ function of the given object even if something bad happened in your code; it's close to the try... finally syntax. For object returned by open, __exit__ corresponds to file closure.

This statement has been introduced with Python 2.6.