Multiple with statements in Python 2.7 using a list comprehension

Question

Question:

I am interested in doing a list comprehension inside a Python with statement, so that I can open multiple context managers at the same time with minimal syntax. I am looking for answers that work with Python 2.7 .

Consider the following code example. I want to use the with statement on variables in an arbitrarily-long list at the same time , preferably in a syntactically-clean fashion.

def do_something(*args):
    contexts = {}
    with [open(arg) as contexts[str(i)] for i, arg in enumerate(args)]:
        do_another_thing(contexts)

do_something("file1.txt", "file2.txt")

Does anybody know if there is a way to involve a list comprehension inside of a with statement in Python 2.7 ?

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Answers to similar questions:

Here are some things I've already looked at, with an explanation of why they do not suit my purposes:

For Python 2.6- , I could use contextlib.nested to accomplish this a bit like:

def do_something(*args):
    contexts = {}
    with nested(*[open(arg) for arg in args]) as [contexts[str(i)] for i in range(len(args))]:
        do_another_thing(contexts)

However, this is deprecated in Python 2.7+ , so I am assuming it is bad practice to use.

Instead, the new syntax was given on this SO answer , as well as this SO answer :

with A() as a, B() as b, C() as c:
    doSomething(a,b,c)

However, I need to be able to deal with an arbitrary input list, as in the example I gave above. This is why I favour list comprehension.

For Python 3.3+ , this SO answer described how this could be accomplished by using ExitStack . However, I am working in Python 2.7.

There is also this solution , but I would prefer to not write my own class to accomplish this.

Is there any hope of combining a list comprehension and a with statement in Python 2.7?

Update 1-3: Updated example to better emphasize the functionality I am looking for

Update 4: Found another similar question . This one has an answer which also suggests ExitStack , a function that is not available in 2.7.

Answer 1

The major tasks of with statement is invoking the __exit__ attribute of its context manager. Specially for dealing with files. So In this case due to this point and the fact that open() returns an file_object you can dimple use a list comprehension in order to create the list of your file objects and just call the exit()/close() manually. But be aware that in this case you have to handle the exceptions manually.

def print_files(*args):
    f_objs = [open(arg) for arg in args]
    # do what you want with f_objs
    # ...
    # at the end
    for obj in f_objs:
        f.close()

Note that if you only want to run some parallel operations on your file objects, I recommend this approach, other wise the best way is using a with statement inside a for loop, and opennning the files in each iteration (on names) like following:

for arg in args:
    with open(arg) as f:
         # Do something with f

For more safety you can use a custom open function in order to handle the exceptions too:

def my_open(*args, **kwargs):
    try:
        file_obj = open(*args, **kwargs)
    except Exception as exp:
        # do something with exp and return a proper object
    else:
        return file_obj

def print_files(*args):
    f_objs = [my_open(arg) for arg in args]
    # do what you want with f_objs
    # ...
    # at the end
    for obj in f_objs:
        try:
            f.close()
        except Exception as exp:
            # handle the exception

Answer 2

Doing this yourself is really tricky, especially handling exceptions that occur while opening or closing the files. I'd recommend just getting a library like contextlib2 that implements the contextlib.ExitStack functionality. Then you can do

with contextlib2.ExitStack() as stack:
    files = [stack.enter_context(open(arg)) for arg in args]
    ...

just like you were using contextlib.ExitStack from Python 3, and everything is handled correctly for you.