Simpler way? [SOLVED]

Question

I just completed a code coach problem but I feel like I am over complicating it. Is there a simpler way to accomplish the task than how I have?

PROBLEM:
You have been asked to make a special book categorization program, which assigns each book a special code based on its title.
The code is equal to the first letter of the book, followed by the number of characters in the title.
For example, for the book "Harry Potter", the code would be: H12, as it contains 12 characters (including the space).

You are provided a books.txt file, which includes the book titles, each one written on a separate line.
Read the title one by one and output the code for each book on a separate line.

For example, if the books.txt file contains:
Some book
Another book

Your program should output:
S9
A12

Recall the readlines() method, which returns a list containing the lines of the file.
Also, remember that all lines, except the last one, contain a \n at the end, which should not be included in the character count.

MY SOLUTION:
file = open("/usercode/files/books.txt", "r")

#your code goes here
fileLines = []
for lines in file:
fileLines.append(lines)
length = 1
for n in fileLines:
if length == len(fileLines):
print(n[0] + str(len(n)))
else:
print(n[0] + str(len(n)-1))
length += 1
file.close()

I am using len(n) - 1 because there is an extra space (“ “) on all of the lines except for the last line. I opted not to use the readlines() method, but maybe I should have?

Thank you for the help!

Answer 1

A short way to do it is like this:

file = open("/usercode/files/books.txt", "r")
for line in file.readlines():
print(f'{line[0]}{len(line.strip())}')
file.close()

Answer 2

Yup I did this way ,just used readlines() similar to what your fileLines list holds after looping over lines in file, and then checked if last character in line contains "\n" or not ,

for lines in file.readlines():
if lines[-1]=="\n":
print(lines[0]+str(len(lines)-1))
else:
print(lines[0]+str(len(lines)))

Answer 3

file = open("/usercode/files/books.txt", "r")
for x in file.readlines():
x = x.strip('\n')
a = len(x)
b = x[0]
print(str(b) + str(a))
file.close()

Answer 4

Instead of dealing with \n we can simply remove it with the help of strip()

file = open("/usercode/files/books.txt", "r")

#your code goes here
books = file.readlines()
books = [x.strip() for x in books]

for book in books:
print(book[0]+str(len(book)))
file.close()

Hope It Helps You 😊

Answer 5

Tharyabha Manek - you are kidding us, right? sorry for my comment. the code you did is working. but only exactly for the file as it is. As soon as we have moore books or less books it will crash. this is called hard-coded.
I am real sure that you are able to do it in a way, that is working for all number of books in the file.

Answer 6

Usually there are many ways to solve a single problem. Simpler way doesn't always mean more clear. Choose the one that works for you ✌️

Answer 7

here is my attempt for this exercise:

for line in open("/usercode/files/books.txt", "r"):
print(f'{line[0]}{len(line.strip())}')

Answer 8

Richard Villarreal strip function just remove trailing and leading characters. Like
"hello World".strip("hed")
>>>llo Worl
#h,e,d are removed from starting and ending

By default strip function remove whitespace which includes \n(newline)

"Harry Potter\n".strip()
>>>Harry Potter

Hope It Helps You 😊

Answer 9

file = open("/usercode/files/books.txt", "r")
for line in file:
line = line.strip("\n")
print(line[0] + str(len(line)))
file.close()

This one is the easiest

Answer 10

Richard Villarreal yes

Answer 11

Here was my solution, for posterity ;)

file = open("/usercode/files/books.txt", "r")
#your code goes here

listed = file.readlines()
relisted = []

for element in listed:
relisted.append(element.strip())

for line in relisted:
print(line[0] + str(len(line)))

file.close()

Answer 12

file = open("/usercode/files/books.txt", "r")

#your code goes here

for line in file:
print(line[0]+ str(len(line.strip('\n'))))

file.close()

Answer 13

file = open("/usercode/files/books.txt", "r")

for line in file:
ti=line.replace('\n','')
count=len(title)
if t in line:
print(f'{title[0]}{count}')
file.close()

Answer 14

Виктор Дмитриевич ,

sorry, i should have given more descriptions to my code snippet.

the new-line sequence is not stripped by default. we are reading the content of the file in a for loop line by line, and store this data temporarly in a variable `line`. this variable is used inside the print() statement together with the method strip().
the result of this expression is the current line, but without any trailing new-line sequences. this is now used as argument for getting the length of the string.

Answer 15

Awesome! Thank you for the reply. I have not seen a negative number in the brackets before and just want to make sure I understand. lines[-1] checks the last character of the current line?

Answer 16

# here input - for the task not needed
xw = ["The Joy of JavaScript\n","Building Native Web Components\n","Practical Machine Learning in JavaScript"]

#input can also be read in with the keyboard as follows
#xw = []
#while True:
#try:
#xw.append(input()+'\n')
#except:
#xw[len(xw)-1] = xw[len(xw)-1][0:len(xw[len(xw)-1])-1]
#break

# writing the books.txt - for the task not needed
file = open("/usercode/files/books.txt", "w")
file.writelines(xw)
file.close()

# reading the books.txt
file = open("/usercode/files/books.txt", "r")
xr = file.readlines()
print(xr) # prints the book's array - for the task not needed

# Coding of them titlels:
# for example, for the book "Some book",
# the code would be: S9,
# as it contains 9 characters (including the space).
for i in range(len(xr)-1):
print(xr[i][0]+str(len(xr[i])-1))
print(xr[len(xr)-1][0]+str(len(xr[len(xr)-1])))
file.close()

Answer 17

file = open("/usercode/files/books.txt", "r")
f=file.readlines()

for i in f:
if "\n" in i:
print(i[0]+str(len(i)-1))

else:
print(i[0]+str(len(i)))

file.close()

it can also coded as above

Answer 18

file = open("/usercode/files/books.txt", "r")

#your code goes here
for book in file:
print(book[0].upper()+str(len(book.strip())))

file.close()

Answer 19

Fill in the blanks to iterate over the string "str" and output each character.

Answer 20

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