Question

If I do the following, does filehandle get closed automatically as it goes out of scope in Python:

def read_contents(file_path):
  return file(file_path).read()

If it doesn’t, how can I write this function to close the scope automatically?

Answer 1

It should close the file handle in the file’s __del__ statement, but a better approach would be to use a with block:

def read_contents(file_path):
  with open(file_path, 'r') as f:
    return f.read()

See http://docs.python.org/library/stdtypes.html#file.close for more information.