[Tutor] Closing an urllib.urlopen

Daniel Yoo dyoo@hkn.eecs.berkeley.edu
Tue, 2 Jan 2001 21:35:10 -0800 (PST)


On Tue, 2 Jan 2001, Timothy M. Brauch wrote:

> I've opened a web page in the following way:
> 
> top_ten_html=urllib.urlopen('http://www.cbs.com/latenight/lateshow/')
> 
> Do I have to close this?  I know with files you don't necessarily need
> to close any files you open, but it is good to do so.  Is it the same
> way with urlopen?

It's the same thing with urlopen() --- you don't have to close it, since
Python figures out when a resource becomes inaccessible and automatically
calls close().  Still, it can't hurt to do the close() manually.