Parse words from lines with colons (simple beginner assignment)

Create a list called destination using the data stored in "travel_plans.txt". Each element of the list should contain a line from the file that lists a country and cities inside that country.

The "travel_plans.txt" contains :

This summer I will be travelling.
I will go to...
Italy: Rome
Greece: Athens
England: London, Manchester
France: Paris, Nice, Lyon
Spain: Madrid, Barcelona, Granada
Austria: Vienna
I will probably not even want to come back!
However, I wonder how I will get by with all the different languages.
I only know English!

So far I have managed to write the following :

with open("travel_plans.txt","r") as fileref:
    for line in fileref:
        row = line.strip().split()
        if ":" in row[0]:
            destination = row
            print(destination)

Is there a better way of getting the same output?

destination = []
with open("travel_plans.txt","r") as fileref:
    for line in fileref:
        row = line.strip()
        if ":" in row:
            destination.append(row)
print(destination)

For a small file, anything more than this would probably be an overkill.

You could make this even shorter.

destination = 

print(destination)

The accepted answer is pretty good. I have a few other suggestions since you are learning.

First, you might consider a slightly more pythonic (by which it is usually meant "readable") approach, which could include breaking this into multiple functions.

def test_line(line):
    """This function returns `None` for lines we don't care about."""
    if ":" in line:
        return line

The second line in the above is called the "docstring". It explains to other readers of your code (including reminding future you) what the code does.

Then your function for handling the lines:

def hande_lines(lines):
    """A list of lines we care about."""
    return 

    

And your function for handling the file:

def handle_file(name):
    """Parse a file into a list of lines we care about."""
    with open(name) as f:
        return hande_lines(f)

Second suggestion: write a test. To test the script, include this at the bottom of your .py file (we call this file a "module"):

if __name__=="__main__":
    # this is just test of the module
    file_name = "travel_plans.txt"
    for value in handle_file(file_name):
        print(value)

Run it by opening the command line in the same directory as your script (and test file), and running this command, where "myapp" is the name of your .py file:

python myapp.py

One final note: rather then using the print function, a much better way to write your tests is to use assert statements.

if __name__=="__main__":
    # this is just test of the module
    file_name = "travel_plans.txt"
    result = handle_file(file_name):
    # make sure all the lines were found:
    assert len(result) == 6
    # make sure all the lines have the colon in them:
    assert all(":" in r for r in result)
    # finally, test a couple of the results that they are what we expect:
    assert result[0] == "Italy: Rome"
    assert result[-1] == "Austria: Vienna"

If any of these assert statements produce an AssertionError, then you know the code you wrote is doing something you don't want it to do.

Learning to write good tests, so that you know your code is doing what you want it to do, is a very good habit to get into right away.