Is it possible to have an optional with/as statement in python?

Question

Instead of this:

FILE = open(f)
do_something(FILE)
FILE.close()

it\'s better to use this:

with open(f) as FILE:
    do_some         


        

Answer 1

While all of the other answers are excellent, and preferable, note that the with expression may be any expression, so you can do:

with (open(file) if file is not None else None) as FILE:
    pass

Note that if the else clause were evaluated, to yield None this would result in an exception, because NoneType does not support the appropriate operations to be used as a context manager.