Implement a simple command-line interface in Python

Submit in your repo in the file individual/cli.py

This is an INDIVIDUAL assignment. (Work on it on your own.)

Goals

• Practice designing a usable command-line interface.
• Practice extracting information programmatically from your chosen dataset (using, probably, python's csv module)
• Practice using python's argparse module.

Rubric

What to do

• Choose a question you would like to ask of your dataset. Make sure the question requires at least one parameter. For example, don't make the question "show me all the books" or "show me all the authors". Rather, make it something like "show me all the books written by author X" or "show me all the authors born between years Y and Z".
• In your individual git repo, create a directory named individual. You'll put all your individual coding and design assignments here for the rest of the term.
• Create a python program called cli.py in the individual directory.

• Design a command-line interface for your question, and express it like in a man page. This is likely to be pretty simple. My first example above, for example, could be supported by a design like this:

  NAME: cli.py - command-line interface exercise SYNOPSIS: python3 cli.py booksby authorname DESCRIPTION: Shows a list of the titles of all the books written by any author whose name contains the specified authorname string, case-insensitively.
  .

  That is, try to describe what your interface causes to happen briefly, but pretty precisely.

• In a comment at the top of cli.py, write the name of the program, your name, and the date. Follow that with your NAME/SYNOPSIS/DESCRIPTION.
• Implement the design of your command-line interface using python's argparse module. (Note: don't use third-party modules like pandas or numpy for this. Interact with your data file via either python's csv or json module, depending on the format of your raw data.)
• Test python3 cli.py -h to make sure you see a sensible usage statement provided by argparse.

• Make sure that copies of your team's chosen dataset are in a folder named data in your repo.

• Commit and push your changes to GitHub. That is, do a suitable sequence of git add, git status, git commit, git pull, and git push to ensure that your changes are saved and included in the central copy of your repo that's stored on github.com.

Advice

• Keep it simple. (If you definitely have the time and desire to mess around implementing something complicated, go wild. It won't earn you extra points, but you might learn something cool.)

• You may hard-code the path of your data file in cli.py. For example, you might include code that looks like this:

  import csv ... with open('../data/books.csv') as f: reader = csv.reader(f) for book_row in reader: ...
• My code samples contain all the techniques you need, so make sure you read and understand them. Feel free to plunder chunks of code from the samples.
• Stuck? Try stuff and check the internet, of course. But don't stay stuck for long. Our Slack is there to provide you a community of helpers.
• Have fun!