Who-Said-It

A guessing game that scrapes quotes from a website and displays a random quote to the user; the user must guess the author of the quote.

     

If you are on MacOS/Linux

1. Ensure you have Python 3.10.1 or above installed by writing python3 --version in the terminal; if not, install Python, open the .pkg file and follow the steps.

2. Check if you have pip installed by running python3 -m pip --version in the terminal.

3. If you don't have pip installed, run python3 -m ensurepip --default-pip in the terminal, and then repeat step 2.

4. Now, in the terminal, do

python3 -m pip install requests
python3 -m pip install bs4
python3 -m pip install jsonpickle

5. To run the code in the terminal, ensure you are in the directory containing guessing_game.py, and write

python3 guessing_game.py

   

If you are on Windows

1. Ensure you have Python 3.10.1 or above installed by writing py --version in the terminal; if not, install Python, open the .exe file and follow the steps (make sure the box that says "Add Python 3.10.X to PATH" is checked).

2. Check if you have pip installed by running py -m pip --version in the terminal.

3. If you don't have pip installed, run py -m ensurepip --default-pip in the terminal, and then repeat step 2.

4. Now, in the terminal, do

py -m pip install requests
py -m pip install bs4
py -m pip install jsonpickle

5. To run the code in the terminal, ensure you are in the directory containing guessing_game.py, and write

py guessing_game.py

     

Limitations/Design Choices

• The scrapy framework would have shortened my code by making scraping easier; I chose to use requests and BeautifulSoup from bs4 to do this "manually", to understand what is happening behind the scenes.

• No delay is needed since the website is intended for scraping (but I added a delay to follow best practices and reduce server load).

• This application could work simply by scraping every time it is run without using a csv, but instead I force the user to load from a csv since it reduces the load on the webpage; it is up to the users discretion if they want to scrape each time or simply load from an existing file (the intention is that you scrape maybe once a week, and use an existing csv for the other times you run the program).

• The quote chosen is supposed to be "random"; I used jsonpickle in-case the user wants to save, quit, and come back later. I used jsonpickle instead of the built-in pickle module because it is more readable.

• DO NOT put malicious code in the json "saved_game" file you load into the program. The code is automatically executed when it is unpickled from the json file, so malicious code could destroy the program.

• No unittests have been implemented; I hope to implement these when I have time. I consider this project "incomplete" because of this.

• I used regular expressions to validate some of the filenames; my use of regex isn't that extensive, and I hope to make more use of it in another project.

• I was going to implement an SQLite3 database that can also be used to store quotes; however, there wasn't any analysis necessary on the data so I decided against it; I hope to use SQLite3 in another project.