"Book titles" problem

Question

Hello to everyone!
I'm new and I'm just learning Python, so please forgive me if I say something wrong/strange.

I saw how to resolve this problem in a fastest way, but I wanted to solve it in my way.
I wrote this code.
As you can see I used a quick command to count the elements in the file (viewed as a list) and used that count to run the "for loop".
The foor loop wasn't a big deal, my question is on that "x" variable. Is there a easier/fastest way to do the same without closing and reopening the file? I'm scared that in a biggest code too much open/close would slow down the program.
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CODE STARTS HERE

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

x = len(list(file))
file.close()

file = open("/usercode/files/books.txt", "r")
i = 0

for line in file:
if i < x :
print(line[0] + str(len(line)-1))

else:
print(line[0]+str(len(line)))
break
i+=1

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Thank you for any advice and for the help :)

Answer 1

the shortest way would be this:

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

the strip() method does remove leading and trailing whitespaces, this includes new-line characters.