Using python “with” statement with try-except block

1. The two code blocks you gave are
   not equivalent
2. The code you described as old way
   of doing things has a serious bug:
   in case opening the file fails you
   will get a second exception in the
   finally clause because f is not
   bound.

The equivalent old style code would be:

try:
    f = open("file", "r")
    try:
        line = f.readline()
    finally:
        f.close()
except IOError:
    <whatever>

As you can see, the with statement can make things less error prone. In newer versions of Python (2.7, 3.1), you can also combine multiple expressions in one with statement. For example:

with open("input", "r") as inp, open("output", "w") as out:
    out.write(inp.read())

Besides that, I personally regard it as bad habit to catch any exception as early as possible. This is not the purpose of exceptions. If the IO function that can fail is part of a more complicated operation, in most cases the IOError should abort the whole operation and so be handled at an outer level. Using with statements, you can get rid of all these try...finally statements at inner levels.