Conditional with statement in Python

Question

Is there a way to begin a block of code with a with statement, but conditionally?

Something like:

if needs_with():
    with get_stuff() as gs:

# do          


        

Answer 1

You can use contextlib.nested to put 0 or more context managers into a single with statement.

>>> import contextlib
>>> managers = []
>>> test_me = True
>>> if test_me:
...     managers.append(open('x.txt','w'))
... 
>>> with contextlib.nested(*managers):                                                       
...  pass                                                    
...                                                             
>>> # see if it closed
... managers[0].write('hello')                                                                                                                              
Traceback (most recent call last):                              
  File "", line 2, in                                    
ValueError: I/O operation on closed file

This solution has its quirks and I just noticed that as of 2.7 its been deprecated. I wrote my own context manager to handle juggling multiple context managers. Its worked for me so far, but I haven't really considered edge conditons

class ContextGroup(object):
    """A group of context managers that all exit when the group exits."""

    def __init__(self):
        """Create a context group"""
        self._exits = []

    def add(self, ctx_obj, name=None):
        """Open a context manager on ctx_obj and add to this group. If
        name, the context manager will be available as self.name. name
        will still reference the context object after this context
        closes.
        """
        if name and hasattr(self, name):
            raise AttributeError("ContextGroup already has context %s" % name)
        self._exits.append(ctx_obj.__exit__)
        var = ctx_obj.__enter__()
        if name:
            self.__dict__[name] = var

    def exit_early(self, name):
        """Call __exit__ on named context manager and remove from group"""
        ctx_obj = getattr(self, name)
        delattr(self, name)
        del self._exits[self._exits.index(ctx_obj)]
        ctx_obj.__exit__(None, None, None)

    def __enter__(self):
        return self

    def __exit__(self, _type, value, tb):
        inner_exeptions = []
        for _exit in self._exits:
            try:
                _exit(_type, value, tb )
            except Exception, e:
                inner_exceptions.append(e)
        if inner_exceptions:
            r = RuntimeError("Errors while exiting context: %s" 
                % (','.join(str(e)) for e in inner_exceptions))

    def __setattr__(self, name, val):
        if hasattr(val, '__exit__'):
            self.add(val, name)
        else:
            self.__dict__[name] = val