CSV Reflection

Getting started is the hardest part…

Pretty consistently throughout this class, taking the first step to get started has been the hardest part. While I can rationalize that just attempting something is better than staring into oblivion for hours, it’s still really difficult to take the first step. In this assignment’s case, reading all of the “to-do’s” was overwhelming me.

Once I got out of my head, I built in the exit condition because that felt like an easy win to getting the ball rolling on the assignment. Next, I started at the beginning of the list and worked my way down.

A few challenge areas

I immediately got stuck on the while loop. I realized that this could be made as an indefinite loop because I called the exit condition using break, but I struggled with defining the while loop to be indefinite. I was searching for values in the code to set it to. After reading the python documentation and reviewing some of the Runestone chapters, I set the loop to while 1 < 2 to see what happens, and that condition ran successfully. Looking back, I definitely was overthinking how to create an indefinite loop.

Another area that I got stuck on was passing the value of a function into the rest of the code. Even though I put “columns to print” into a function, I was struggling to get it out of the function. After using print() to determine what the value was and what was being read, I was able to add columns_to_print = columns_to_print_func(), letting this value into the rest of the code.

My week 1 code is below:

Revisiting the code

After coming back to the code this week, I realized that I had misinterpreted part of the instructions. While I technically completed all of the requests in the “to-dos”, I had not put the capabilities into the while loop choice. Instead, every time the loop ran, the user had to set it up again.

while 1 < 2:
  columns_to_print = columns_to_print_func()
  choice_str = interface.get_menu_choice(menu_dict)

I initially switched columns_to_print = columns_to_print_func() and filename = interface.get_csv_filename() into their respective menu items. However, I got an error that this did not exist to be called first. So I have this code duplicated before the while loop as setup and in the while loop.

Another challenge I faced was that in the code, filename was switching in this line: if interface.input_is_yes(f"File '{filename}' has {len(headers)} columns. Select which columns to print?\n", default = "y"):, but the number of columns still reflected whatever file the user chose in setup. After carefully tracing how the functions interact with each other and adding a print() statement, I realized that I was getting the csv name, but not importing it or determining the new headers. After including the following code in choice 4, the program ran as expected.

filename = interface.get_csv_filename()
import_csv_function()
row_dicts_list = import_csv_function()
headers = row_dicts_list[0].keys()

Here is my final week 2 code:

Going forward

The next step I would take in refactoring this code is trying to include

filename = interface.get_csv_filename()
import_csv_function()
row_dicts_list = import_csv_function()
headers = row_dicts_list[0].keys()

only once in the code instead of at the start and in the while loop. I also would move forward to write a function that would clean up the schools-messy.csv file.

My best debugging skills for me, so far