PMG Coding Challenge

This repository holds my submission for the PMG Graduate Leadership Program Coding Challenge. It is a Python program which combines Comma-Separated Value (CSV) files into one unified file and adds a new column, which stores the source filename of each item on the list. Looking forward to share my work with the PMG team :)

Description

For this challenge, I chose to implement my own methods to manipulate the generated CSV files, as they are ultimately plaintext. For larger and more varied files, I would use a library like Pandas and PyArrow, which may be faster.

If I had more time, I would:

• Add more unit tests for comprehensive code coverage.
• Create a unified class in csv_combiner_test.py to avoid redeclaring shared arguments.
• Improve the generator by adding more category and item names from a dictionary.
• Create alternative versions based on Pandas and PyArrow and compare speeds.

How To Use

To use the CSV Combiner, run the following command in the project's directory: ./csv_combiner argv1 argv2 ...

• argv1 is a relative path to a CSV file
• argv2 (optional) is a relative path to another CSV file
• ... (optional) is any number of additional relative paths to CSV files separated by a space

Example: ./csv_combiner ./fixtures/accessories.csv ./fixtures/household_cleaners.csv

The program will print the resulting file to standard output (stdout). If you wish to save the output to a file, you may redirect the output to another non-existing or existing file by adding > filename

• filename is a relative path to a file where output will be stored

Example: ./csv_combiner ./fixtures/accessories.csv household_cleaners.csv > items.csv

Program Structure

Combiner

The program itself is contained within csv_combiner.py as a Combiner class. It can be used with either standard input arguments via the main() method or with any predetermined array of arguments via the combineFiles() method.

Generator

The provided generatefixtures.py file has been transformed into csv_generator.py, which contains a Generator class used in csv_combiner_test.py to create CSV files and fill them with semi-random data for testing.

Tester

The file csv_combiner_test.py is a unit test file that aims to automate testing of the program csv_combiner.py.