Pls how do I solve this 🙏

Question

In the "Book titles" project. They asked to print the first letter and the length of the title. i.e "Harry Potter" prints "H12"
My code:

file = open("books.txt", "r" )
for book in file
length = str(len(book))
start = book[0]
print (start + length)

My Output:
H13
T17
P20
G18

Their Output:
H12
T16
P19
G18

Answer 1

Elijah Nwalozie ,

a very short version would be:

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

Answer 2

Elijah Nwalozie ,

to get rid of the problem having a "\n" (newline) at some lines when reading from the file, you could use a string method that will strip away all kinds of whitespace from the string. as a newline sequence is also a whitespace, you can use this procedure:

...
... some_string.strip()):
...

Answer 3

Also, remember that all lines, except the last one, contain a \n at the end, which should not be included in the character count.

Answer 4

Oh thanks

Answer 5

Thanks Lothar. I never knew the use of the strip() method.
file = open("/usercode/files/books.txt", "r")
i = 1
name = file.readlines()
#your code goes here
for book in name:
if i < len(name):
print(book[0] + str(len(book) - 1))
i += 1
else:
print(book[0] + str(len(book)))

file.close()

This was the code I later used. Anyone know a shorter way I can write this?