Most efficient way to do "Book Titles" Python project?

Question

I was doing the "Book Titles" project for Python Core, but I really have no idea how to do it in the most efficient way.

Here's what I did:
file = open("/usercode/files/books.txt", "r")

#your code goes here
c = file.readlines()
c0 = c[0]
c1 = c[1]
c2 = c[2]
c3 = c[3]
print(c0[0] + str(len(c0) -1))
print(c1[0] + str(len(c1)-1))
print(c2[0] + str(len(c2)-1))
print(c3[0] + str(len(c3)))
file.close()

Can anyone tell me how I could have spent less time doing this project? Thanks.

Answer 1

1. You can use a context manager (no need to worry about closing the file, it will be handled for you)
with open('filename', 'r') as file:

2. Then use a for loop to loop through the lines of the file. (You don't actually need to use readlines() or read() here, but you can if preferred)
for line in file:

3. Output the first char of the line (line[0]) and then use the strip() method to remove the trailing newline character '\n' from the line before outputting its len(). You can either concatenate the string or use an f-string for the output.
print(f"{line[0]}{len(line.strip())}")

Answer 2

ChaoticDawg Some of that wasn’t even discussed… like the strip() method.

Answer 3

Okay, so update…
Looking back at the List Operation “in”, it appears I could have combined an “if” statement with this, like so:

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

#your code goes here
for x in file.readlines():
if "\n" in x:
print(x[0] + str(len(x) - 1))
else:
print(x[0] + str(len(x)))

file.close()