How to use socket in Python as a context manager?

Question

It seems like it would be only natural to do something like:

with socket(socket.AF_INET, socket.SOCK_DGRAM) as s: 

but Python doesn't implement a context manager for socket. Can I easily use it as a context manager, and if so, how?

Answer 1

The socket module is fairly low-level, giving you almost direct access to the C library functionality.

You can always use the contextlib.contextmanager decorator to build your own:

import socket from contextlib import contextmanager  @contextmanager def socketcontext(*args, **kw):     s = socket.socket(*args, **kw)     try:         yield s     finally:         s.close()  with socketcontext(socket.AF_INET, socket.SOCK_DGRAM) as s: 

or use contextlib.closing() to achieve the same effect:

from contextlib import closing  with closing(socket.socket(socket.AF_INET, socket.SOCK_DGRAM)) as s: 

but the contextmanager() decorator gives you the opportunity to do other things with the socket first.

Python 3.x does make socket() a context manager, but the documentation wasn't updated to reflect this until well into the Python 3.5 cycle, in 2016. See the socket class in the source code, which adds __enter__ and __exit__ methods.