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I have written a Python program to take in two strings and print the larger of the two strings.

Here is my code -

string1 = input("Enter first string: ")
string2 = input("Enter second string: ")
count1 = 0
count2 = 0
for i in string1:
 count1 = count1 + 1

for j in string2:
 count2 = count2 + 1

if (count1 < count2):
 print ("Larger string is:")
 print (string2)

elif (count1 == count2):
 print ("Both strings are equal.")
else:
 print ("Larger string is:")
 print (string1)

Here are some example outputs -

Enter first string: everything
Enter second string: nothing
Larger string is:
everything

Enter first string: cat
Enter second string: apple
Larger string is:
apple

So, I would like to know whether I could make this program shorter and more efficient.

Python strings supports Python built-in len function. You don't need to iterate through them manually, as for lists/dicts/sets etc (it is not Pythonic):

def compare_strings_len(s1, s2):
 if len(s1) > len(s2):
 print('String 1 is longer: ', s1)
 elif len(s1) < len(s2):
 print('String 2 is longer: ', s2)
 else:
 print('Strings length are equal!')

Long live the Ternary:

def print_longer(s,s2):
 # return (s,s2)[len(s)<len(s2)] if you don't want to print within the function.
 print( ( s, s2 )[ len(s) < len(s2) ] )

Explanation:

if-else statements are clean, but they're verbose. A ternary operation would reduce this to a one-liner.

The format is as follows: (result_if_false,result_if_true)[comparison]

What is happening is that (s,s2) is creating a tuple of the two strings. len(s)<len(s2) then compares the two, and because they're within square brackets []; the boolean result is casted to an integer index.

Since you can only have a 0 or 1 result, this returns s if it is larger than s2, and vice-versa.

EDIT: This returns s if both strings are of equal lengths.

Here's how I would get the longer string:

max(string_1, string_2, key=len) # Returns the longer string

The key keyword argument is a pattern you'll see frequently in python. It accepts a function as an argument (in our case len).

If you wanted to find the longest of multiple strings, you could do that too:

max('a', 'bc', 'def', 'ghi', 'jklm', key=len) # => 'jklm'