Alright, let’s dive into this “customer shopping” thing. So, the other day, I was tasked with… well, simulating a customer shopping experience. Sounds simple, right? Wrong. It always starts simple.
First off, I needed some data. Dummy data, of course. I started by brainstorming a list of potential products. You know, the usual suspects: electronics, clothes, food, books. Then I thought, “Nah, gotta make it interesting.” So, I threw in some weird stuff like a “vintage rubber chicken” and “self-stirring coffee mug.” Why not?
Next, I had to figure out how to represent this data. I opted for a simple JSON structure. Each product had a name, a price, a description (which I shamelessly ripped from some random websites), and an “in_stock” boolean. Getting the prices right was a pain. I mean, how much should a vintage rubber chicken cost? I just winged it.
Then came the fun part: the actual shopping simulation. My goal was to create a basic command-line interface where a user could “browse” products, add them to a “cart,” and then “checkout.” I figured I’d use Python for this. It’s my go-to for quick-and-dirty scripting.
I started by writing a function to load the product data from the JSON file. Pretty straightforward stuff. Then, I wrote a function to display the products in a nicely formatted way. I even added pagination, because who wants to scroll through a hundred products at once?
The “add to cart” functionality was a little trickier. I used a dictionary to represent the cart, with product names as keys and quantities as values. When a user added a product, I either incremented the quantity if it was already in the cart, or added it with a quantity of one if it wasn’t.
Checkout was the final boss. I had to calculate the total price, including tax (I chose a random tax rate of 7.5%). I also added a rudimentary “out of stock” check. If a user tried to buy more of a product than was available, I displayed an error message and prevented them from checking out.
Here’s the thing that got me: error handling. I mean, I’m just simulating things, but what if the JSON file is corrupted? What if the user enters invalid input? I ended up adding a bunch of try-except blocks to handle various potential errors. It’s never perfect, but it’s better than nothing.
Finally, I added a little bit of user interaction. The CLI allows you to list products with pagination, add the selected item to the cart, view the cart, and checkout.
After a lot of debugging and tweaking, I finally had something that worked. It wasn’t pretty, but it did the job. A basic customer shopping simulation, complete with vintage rubber chickens and self-stirring coffee mugs.
- Load product data from a JSON file.
- Display products with pagination.
- Add products to a cart.
- Calculate the total price with tax.
- Check for “out of stock” items.
- Handle potential errors.
What did I learn? Even simple tasks can get surprisingly complex. Error handling is crucial. And sometimes, you just need to throw in a vintage rubber chicken to keep things interesting.
