Need help converting text to csv format

[Tim Golden]

Joe Strout wrote:
> A follow-up question here... is it really necessary to close things like 
> files in Python?  I've been slumming it in the REALbasic community for 
> the last decade, where you generally don't worry about such things, as 
> any object that represents something "open" will automatically "close" 
> itself when it dies (and since a closed object in those cases is 
> useless, I'd rather not have it around after it's closed anyway). Is the 
> same true in Python, or do we need to explicitly close things?


Implementation dependent. (Because it depends on what kind
of garbage collection or object finalisation happens). Like
most people, I imagine, in ad-hoc code I'll just do things 
like:

<code
import csv

writer = csv.writer (open ("data.csv", "wb"))
writer.writerow (['blah', blah'])

</code>

If I exit the interpreter here, I'm pretty much safe.
But if I add os.startfile ("data.csv"), I'll likely
get nothing or a file lock.

I believe that in other implementations -- Jython,
for example -- you cannot rely on the file closing
itself.

In general in posting public code, especially to
newcomers, I make the effort to use a try-finally
or a with statement.

TJG