when should I explicitly close a file?

[Lie Ryan]

On 04/17/10 21:23, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
> In message 
> <d48b70da-5384-4dc6-9527-46c6b735ccc0 at r1g2000yqb.googlegroups.com>, gelonida 
> wrote:
> 
>> I've been told, that following code snippet is not good.
>>
>> open("myfile","w").write(astring) ...
> 
> I do that for reads, but never for writes.
> 
> For writes, you want to give a chance for write errors to raise an exception 
> and alert the user, instead of failing silently, to avoid inadvertent data 
> loss. Hence the explicit close.

In short, in case of doubt, just be explicit.

Since in python nothing is guaranteed about implicit file close, you
must always explicitly close it.