Instructions for timeProfiler

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Armed with Python knowledge from your first two problem sets, you've decided to form a software startup that provides your fellow students with useful programs.

Since time is important to all Wellesley students, you've decided your first program should be a time profiler that helps students calculate how they spend their time during a typical week. The program will ask the user to enter a few pieces of information, and then will display a few calculations about the time spent on various things every week:

1. Work: This is time spent working for pay.
2. Sleep: This is the amount of time you spend sleeping each week.
3. Coursework: This includes time in class plus homework time. You should assume that two hours of homework time are required for every hour in class.
4. Extra Activities: This includes time spent in organized athletics, music activities, clubs and any other extracurricular activities. Your program will ask the user to name this category.
5. Free Time: For simplicity, this category encompasses all activities not covered by the other activities above.

When you call your timeProfile function, it should prompt the user to enter information about these activities and display a time profile. We have provided three example executions of the time profiling program that show how your program should behave, and the test_timeProfiler.py starter file can automatically report whether your output is correct, or if not, where the first difference was detected. In each run, text in black is displayed by the program, while text highlighted in blue is entered by the user.

Note that in the example output, each number of hours has been rounded to two decimal places (in some cases Python only shows one because the second is a zero).

Also note that your program should ask the user for the name of the category used to describe the 'everything else' category, and then use that name in the remainder of the program. In the examples below, Latanya chose to use the name 'organizing', Alex chose to use the label 'extracurricular', and Yuting chose to use the name 'fun'. The user of the program gets to decide which name to use to describe that category, and your program incorporates that name into the profile.

In this task, you will write a time profiling Python program timeProfiler.py from scratch in Thonny that has the behavior indicated by the sample executions above. You are also required to define several supporting functions and use them within the timeProfile function.

Your goal is to create a timeProfiler.py program that behaves exactly as indicated by the sample executions provided, and works reasonably on other sample inputs that might be used to test it.

Required Functions

It's possible to write all of your code inside a single timeProfile function and match the example outputs we provided. But such a program would not be elegant, because lots of code would need to be repeated. Instead, you must define each of the following functions individually, and then use them together to write timeProfile.

inputFloat

You will notice that one task performed repeatedly in the examples is to ask the user for some kind of number. However, as you may remember, Python's built-in input function always returns what the user types as a string, and if we want a number, it must be converted. Since this pattern of asking for input and converting it to a (floating point) number happens several times, you must write a function to do that, called inputFloat. inputFloat must accept 1 argument to determine the prompt, and then must call input using that prompt to retrieve a string from the user. Then it must convert that to a floating-point number using float and return the resulting number. These inputFloat examples demonstrate how it should work.

formatHours

If you study the example output you will see that when displaying information about the time spent on different activities, there is a standard format used: a number of hours, rounded to two decimal places, followed by a label like "work hours." As part of the approach to indenting these messages, you must write a formatHours function which has two parameters: a number of hours (as a floating-point number) and a label (as a string). As shown in these formatHours examples, the function must return a string containing the number rounded to two decimal places, plus the label, separated by a single space.

By returning a string, this function will enable other code to call it and store the result in a variable, which will then enable things like measuring the length of that variable.

indentMessage

To get the indentation of the last four lines of output correct, so that all of the bars line up and can be compared, you must define an indentMessage function which takes 2 parameters: a message string, and a target length (an integer). This function will add spaces to the left-hand side of the message it is given, returning a new message whose length (including spaces) is equal to the target length. If the message length already meets or exceeds the target length, zero spaces will be added and the message will be returned as-is.

In timeProfile you will be able to line things up correctly by: 1. First computing a target length equal to the length of longest of your five messages. 2. Then calling indentMessage with that target length on each message to create indented messages whose lengths are the same. These indentMessage examples demonstrate how it must work.

createBar

The last component of the output that we need to assemble is the bars of characters which appear after the colons. Because these bars can only have a whole number of letters in them, we will need to round the amount of time to the nearest integer using the round function before using the * operator to repeat the desired letter. Since this process needs to happen once for each bar, you must create a createBar function which takes two parameters: a letter to repeat and a length value (as a floating-point number). It must round off the length value and then return a string consisting of that many copies of the letter it was given. These createBar examples demonstrate how it must work.

timeProfile

Once you've defined all of the other required functions, you are ready to define timeProfile itself. It will not take any arguments, and must call each of your other functions. To ensure that you are not repeating work done by those other functions, timeProfile must call input exactly twice and it must NOT call round or float itself (the formatHours and createBar functions will handle all of the necessary rounding, and inputFloat will handle type conversion).

It must read inputs from the user and then print out a time profile showing how many hours per week are spent on various tasks, with bars of repeated letters allowing a visual comparison of these values. These timeProfile examples show how it should work.

Testing

We've provided a test_timeProfile file which has tests for each individual helper function as well as tests of timeProfile itself. These tests will be skipped if you haven't yet defined one of the functions, so you can (and should) run this file each time you finish one of the required functions, and then fix any problems that it reports before moving on to the next function.

Notes

• While timeProfile must call print, none of the other required functions may call print. They must each be fruitful, returning their results so that timeProfile can actually use them.

• Your program should not use any Python features that we have not studied yet, including conditionals (i.e., if statements) or loops.

• For a completely correct solution, things like spacing and the number of digits after a decimal point in a number are important. But you will receive most of the credit for solutions that are not exactly correct. In order to check whether your output is totally correct, see the section on testing above.

• Make sure you double-check the rubric, including the procedure requirements and the style requirements. In particular, although the style requirements are extra goals, they represent principles which, if violated, often lead to incorrect code.

• As usual, each function you write must include a docstring.

• Also as usual, you must not waste fruit and you must not waste boxes.