It’s end of the week again so we review the code challenge of this week. It’s never late to join, just fork our challenges repo and start coding.
Learning
Julian
The simplicity of this challenge is what made it fun for me. The challenge was in deciding how to store and manage the data in the most effective (and hopefully Pythonic!) way.
I decided to go with multiple dicts: dicts for each room and then one main dict for the list of rooms.
Code wise, the challenge was to then properly list out the required keys and values of each dict when required. I did this using nested for loops in the print_contents() function.
I also added in a quick function to get the value of each room in total. It was satisfying seeing the result of sum(v.values()) appear! See output below:
$ python inventory_julian.py
Study
computer: $1200
lg flatron monitor: $300
samsung monitor: $500
desk: $400
guitar: $500
Living Room
couch: $1000
tv: $3000
playstation: $500
speakers: $600
beanbag: $30
Master Bedroom
bed: $400
mattress: $1000
chair: $180
drawers: $250
lamp: $20
Totals:
Study: $2900
Living Room: $5130
Master Bedroom: $1850
Code here.
Bob
I had fun making an interactive version for this. This forced me to think about user input validation: name of item is required, value requires an int.
There might be a bit repetition in resulting get_name and get_value, they both ask for user input, yet do different validations.
Maybe something to wrap in a validation class …
Nice constructs I could use: defaultdict, namedtuple and format printing.
Before I would have mixed calculation and printing, now I isolating the summing in calc_totals function which makes it a bit cleaner.
See output below – I changed the NUM_ITEMS constant to 2 for shorter output (could make it a command line arg …)
$ python inventory_bob.py
Entering items for room study:
* Item #1:
- Enter the name of the item: monitor
- Enter the value of the item: 200
* Item #2:
- Enter the name of the item: laptop
- Enter the value of the item: 1000
Entering items for room living_room:
* Item #1:
- Enter the name of the item: sofa
- Enter the value of the item: 600
* Item #2:
- Enter the name of the item: tv
- Enter the value of the item: 500
Entering items for room master_bedroom:
* Item #1:
- Enter the name of the item: bed
- Enter the value of the item: 1000
* Item #2:
- Enter the name of the item: couch
- Enter the value of the item: 400
* Room: study
monitor : 200
laptop : 1000
--
Subtotal : 1200
* Room: living_room
sofa : 600
tv : 500
--
Subtotal : 1100
* Room: master_bedroom
bed : 1000
couch : 400
--
Subtotal : 1400
----
Total : 3700
Code here.
Bonus: simple API
This was also a good occasion to make a simple API with Flask, which we practiced here.
Feedback
What was your solution? Feel free to share in the comments below.
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See you next week …