Implementing use of 'with object() as f' in custom class in python

Question

I have to open a file-like object in python (it's a serial connection through /dev/) and then close it. This is done several times in several methods of my class. How I WAS doing it was opening the file in the constructor, and then closing it in the destructor. I'm getting weird errors though and I think it has to do with the garbage collector and such, I'm still not used to not knowing exactly when my objects are being deleted =\

The reason I was doing this is because I have to use tcsetattr with a bunch of parameters each time I open it and it gets annoying doing all that all over the place. So I want to implement an inner class to handle all that so I can use it doing
with Meter('/dev/ttyS2') as m:

I was looking online and I couldn't find a really good answer on how the with syntax is implemented. I saw that it uses the __enter__(self) and __exit(self)__ methods. But is all I have to do implement those methods and I can use the with syntax? Or is there more to it?

Is there either an example on how to do this or some documentation on how it's implemented on file objects already that I can look at?

Answer 1

The first Google hit (for me) explains it simply enough:

http://effbot.org/zone/python-with-statement.htm

and the PEP explains it more precisely (but also more verbosely):

http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0343/

Answer 2

Those methods are pretty much all you need for making the object work with with statement.

In __enter__ you have to return the file object after opening it and setting it up.

In __exit__ you have to close the file object. The code for writing to it will be in the with statement body.

class Meter():
    def __init__(self, dev):
        self.dev = dev
    def __enter__(self):
        #ttysetattr etc goes here before opening and returning the file object
        self.fd = open(self.dev, MODE)
        return self.fd
    def __exit__(self, type, value, traceback):
        #Exception handling here
        close(self.fd)

meter = Meter('dev/tty0')
with meter as m:
    #here you work with the file object.
    m.read()

Answer 3

Easiest may be to use standard Python library module contextlib:

import contextlib

@contextlib.contextmanager
def themeter(name):
    theobj = Meter(name)
    yield theobj
    theobj.close()  # or whatever you need to do at exit

This doesn't make Meter itself a context manager (and therefore is non-invasive to that class), but rather "decorates" it (not in the sense of Python's "decorator syntax", but rather almost, but not quite, in the sense of the decorator design pattern;-) with a factory function themeter which is a context manager (which the contextlib.contextmanager decorator builds from the "single-yield" generator function you write) -- this makes it so much easier to separate the entering and exiting condition, avoids nesting, &c.