What is exactly a file-like object in Python?

Question

In http://docs.python.org/library/json.html:

simplejson.load(fp[, encoding[, cls[, object_hook[, parse_float[, parse_int[, parse_constant[, object_

Answer 1

File-like objects are mainly StringIO objects, connected sockets and, well, actual file objects.

If everything goes well, urllib.urlopen() returns a file-like object supporting the necessary methods.