Andrew Barnert, 03.03.2013 14:24:
For example, if you do "with open(path) as f:" the context manager doesn't (and shouldn't) do anything to protect you from a FileNotFoundError in the open, or an IOError reading inside the block. If you want to, say, log, or try a backup file, how else would you handle that but a with inside a try?
If you really care about errors when opening the file (i.e. when creating the context manager), then the correct way to do this is to only wrap the creation of the context manager in a try-except clause, i.e. try: f = open("somefile.txt") except FileNotFoundError: do_stuff() raise # or return, or whatever with f: do_other_stuff() Otherwise, you risk accidentally catching (and potentially shadowing) exceptions that originated from the body of the with statement instead of just the context manager creation. This may look a bit overly complicated for a file, but it quickly becomes more obvious for more complex context managers, e.g. those that may raise more common errors like ValueError or AttributeError. Stefan