Accessing variables declared inside a WITH block outside of it - why does it work? [duplicate]

Question

I'm starting to learn some Python and found out about the with block.

To start of here's my code:

def load_words():
    """
    Returns a list of valid words. Words are strings of lowercase letters.
    
    Depending on the size of the word list, this function may
    take a while to finish.
    """
    print("Loading word list from file...")
    with open(WORDLIST_FILENAME, 'r') as inFile:
        line = inFile.readline()
        wlist = line.split()
        print("  ", len(wlist), "words loaded.")
    print(wlist[0])
    inFile.close()
    return wlist

My understanding was that the inFile variable would only exist/be valid inside the block. But the inFile.close() call after the block does not crash the program or throw an exception?

Similarly wlist is declared inside the block, yet I have no issue with returning wlist at the end of the method.

Can anyone help explain why it works like this? Perhaps my understanding of with blocks is incorrect.

Answer 1

You can read the variables inside a with block because the with statement does't add any scope to your program, it's just a statement to make your code cleaner when calling the object you refer in it.

This:

with open('file.txt', 'r') as file:
    f = file.read()
print(f)

Outputs the same as:

file = open('file.txt', 'r') 
f = file.read()
file.close()

print(f)

So the main difference is that makes your code cleaner