As of Python 2.7 (or 3.1 respectively) you can write
with open('a', 'w') as a, open('b', 'w') as b:
do_something()
(Historical note: In earlier versions of Python, you can sometimes use
contextlib.nested()
to nest context managers. This won’t work as expected for opening multiples files, though — see the linked documentation for details.)
In the rare case that you want to open a variable number of files all at the same time, you can use contextlib.ExitStack
, starting from Python version 3.3:
with ExitStack() as stack:
files = [stack.enter_context(open(fname)) for fname in filenames]
# Do something with "files"
Note that more commonly you want to process files sequentially rather than opening all of them at the same time, in particular if you have a variable number of files:
for fname in filenames:
with open(fname) as f:
# Process f