Question

Here is the snippet. How can I re-write this to do away with the first WHILE loop?

start = 1
end = 4
currentcount = 0
while start < end:

    file = open('C:\Users\Owner\Desktop\\test' + str(start) + '.txt')
    for line in file:    

        f = o.open('http://www.test.com/?userid=' + line.strip())
        f.close()
        time.sleep(10)

        currentcount += 1

    start += 1

Answer 1

Change your while loop to this:

for i in range(start, end):

Then use i in the method body. Other points:

• Using start as a counter is potentially confusing. If you change the value of start it is no longer the start.
• Use a raw string for the path:
  r'C:\Users\Owner\Desktop\test'
• Consider using str.format to build the string rather than string concatenation.

In Python 2.x xrange can be slightly more efficient than range, although that probably isn’t a significant issue here given the size of the numbers involved.