contextlib.closing

Some things should be closed after the use. Some of them are provided as context managers (open is a notable example), and some of them aren't (say, socket.socket).

Writing such context manager is trivial:

@contextmanager
def socket_context(*args, **kwargs):
    try:
        sock = socket(*args, **kwargs)
        yield sock
    finally:
        sock.close()

To avoid writing a context manager for every type of closing object , you can you universal contextlib.closing:

with closing(socket.socket(socket.AF_INET6)) as sock:
    sock.connect(addr)
    sock.sendall(data)

If you still like to have a socket_context name, but don't want to write the monotonous try-yield-finally-close, you should wrap closing:

def socket_context(*args, **kwargs):
    return closing(socket.socket(*args, **kwargs))