Palindrome Checking

Introduction

• Due date: Check Discord or the Course Materials Schedule
• This assignment is graded as described in the syllabus section for an Engineering Efforts Assignment Evaluation
• Submit this assignment on GitHub following the expectations in the syllabus on Assignment Submission.
• To begin, read this README based on the Proactive Programmers' project instructions
• This project has been adapted from Proactive Programmers' material, thus discrepancies are possible.
• Post to the #data-structures Discord channel for questions and clarifications.
• For reference, check the starter repo
• Modifications to the gatorgrade.yml file are not permitted without explicit instruction.

Learning Objectives

This assignment is about making a Command Line Interface to check for palindromes. The learning objectives of this assignment are to:

1. Use Git and GitHub to manage source code file changes
2. Implement recursive and non-recursive palindrome functions
3. Implement test functions for pytest and check test coverage
4. Import modules from packages
5. Demonstrate professional skills in linting and formatting
6. Write clearly about the programming concepts in this assignment.

Seeking Assistance

Please review the course expectations on the syllabus about Seeking Assistance. Students are reminded to uphold the Honor Code. Cloning the assignment repository is a commitment to the latter.

For this assignment, you may use class materials, textbooks, notes, and the internet. Ensure that your writing is original and based on your own understanding of the concepts.

To claim that work is your own, it is essential to craft the logic and the writing together without copying or using the logical structure of another source. The honor code holds everyone to this standard.

If outside of lab you have questions, the #data-structures Discord channel, TL office hours, instructor office hours, and GitHub Issues can be utilized.

Project Details

This engineering effort invites you to implement a program called palindromechecker that can determine whether or not an input word is or is not a palindrome, or a word that is spelled the same both forwards and backwards. For instance, the word civic is a palindrome because it is spelled the same both forwards and backwards while example is not. Specifically, you will implement one approach to palindrome checking that uses recursion and another that reverses the word. In addition to implementing these two approaches for palindrome checking, you will create a comprehensive command-line interface using Typer. Along with implementing your own test cases for the functions that determine whether the word is a palindrome, you will also add documentation to your palindromechecker in the form of docstrings for both the functions and the module.

Expected Output

This project invites you to implement a Python program, called palindromechecker, that features different ways determine whether or not a number is a palindrome. After you finish a correct implementation of all the program's features, running it with the command poetry run palindromechecker --word civic --approach recursive, it will produce this output. See a later section for more output examples!

✨ Awesome, using the recursive approach for palindrome checking!

🔖 Going to check to see if the word "civic" is a palindrome!

😆 Is this word a palindrome? Yes, it is!

Don't forget that you can display palindromechecker's help menu and learn more about its features by typing poetry run palindromechecker --help to show the following output. This help menu shows that palindromechecker has a --approach flag that enables it to check whether or not a word is a palindrome through the use of a reverse-based or recursive-based technique.

╭─ Options ─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────╮
│ *  --word                    TEXT                [default: None]      │
│                                                  [required]           │
│    --approach                [recursive|reverse  [default: reverse]   │
│                              ]                                        │
│    --install-complet…        [bash|zsh|fish|pow  Install completion   │
│                              ershell|pwsh]       for the specified    │
│                                                  shell.               │
│                                                  [default: None]      │
│    --show-completion         [bash|zsh|fish|pow  Show completion for  │
│                              ershell|pwsh]       the specified shell, │
│                                                  to copy it or        │
│                                                  customize the        │
│                                                  installation.        │
│                                                  [default: None]      │
│    --help                                        Show this message    │
│                                                  and exit.            │
╰───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────╯

Please note that the provided source code does not contain all of the functionality needed to produce the output displayed in this section and later in the project description. As the next section explains, you should add the features needed to ensure that palindromechecker produces the expected output! Importantly, this project invites you to add both a recursion-based and reversal-based algorithm for palindrome checking.

Reminder

Don't forget that if you want to run the palindromechecker program you must use your terminal window to first go into the GitHub repository containing this project and then go into the palindromechecker directory that contains the project's source code. Finally, remember that before running the program you must run poetry install to add its dependencies, such as Pyinstrument, Pytest, and Rich.

Adding Functionality

If you study the file palindromechecker/palindromechecker/main.py you will see that it has many TODO markers that designate the parts of the program that you need to implement before palindromechecker will produce correct output. Once you complete a task associated with a TODO marker, make sure that you delete it and revise the prompt associated with the marker into a meaningful comment. To ensure that the program works correctly, you must implement all of these functions in the palindrome module:

• def to_chars(word: str) -> str
• def is_palindrome(word: str) -> bool
• def is_palindrome_recursive(word: str) -> bool
• is_palindrome_reverse(word: str) -> bool

After finishing your implementation of palindromechecker you should repeatedly run the program in different configurations to confirm that it produces the correct output. Since the palindromechecker provides a checking mode based on reversing the string or recursively checking the string, you should make sure that both approaches work correctly. You should also confirm that the palindromechecker can correctly determine when a word both is and is not a palindrome. Here are some examples that show the program's correct execution for different values for the --word and --approach arguments. If you correctly resolve all of the TODO markers in the provided source code your program should produce the same output for each of these commands.

• poetry run palindromechecker --word civic --approach reverse

✨ Awesome, using the recursive approach for palindrome checking!

🔖 Going to check to see if the word "civic" is a palindrome!

😆 Is this word a palindrome? Yes, it is!

• poetry run palindromechecker --word civic --approach reverse

✨ Awesome, using the reverse approach for palindrome checking!

🔖 Going to check to see if the word "civic" is a palindrome!

😆 Is this word a palindrome? Yes, it is!

• poetry run palindromechecker --word origin --approach recursive

✨ Awesome, using the recursive approach for palindrome checking!

🔖 Going to check to see if the word "origin" is a palindrome!

😆 Is this word a palindrome? No, it is not!

• poetry run palindromechecker --word origin --approach reverse

✨ Awesome, using the reverse approach for palindrome checking!

🔖 Going to check to see if the word "origin" is a palindrome!

😆 Is this word a palindrome? No, it is not!

Running Checks

If you study the source code in the pyproject.toml file you will see that it includes the following section that specifies different executable tasks like ruff. If you are in the palindromechecker directory that contains the pyproject.toml file and the poetry.lock file, the tasks in this section make it easy to run commands like poetry run task ruff to automatically run the ruff linter designed to check the Python source code in your program and its test suite to confirm that your source code adheres to the industry-standard. You can also use the command poetry run task fix to automatically reformat the source code. poetry run task ruffdetails will print out detailed linting errors that point to exactly what ruff views as a linting error. Make sure to examine the pyproject.toml file for other convenient tasks that you can use to both check and improve your project!

Along with running tasks like poetry run task ruff, you can run the command gatorgrade --config config/gatorgrade.yml to check your work. If your work meets the baseline requirements and adheres to the best practices that proactive programmers adopt you will see that all the checks pass when you run gatorgrade. You can study the config/gatorgrade.yml file in your repository to learn how the :material-github: GatorGrade program runs :material-github: GatorGrader to automatically check your program and technical writing. If your program has all of the anticipated functionality, you can run the command poetry run task test and see that the test suite produces output like the following. Can you add comments to explain how these tests work? What are the key components of every test case created with Pytest? How do the tests "cover" the source code the of the program?

tests/test_main.py ....
tests/test_palindrome.py ....
tests/test_util.py ..

This project comes with other tasks that you can run once you have used Poetry to install all of the dependencies. For instance, You can also run commands like poetry run task mypy to check the program's use of data types and poetry run task markdownlint to ensure that your source code and writing adhere to other established conventions. For this assignment, you can also use the command poetry run task coverage to create a coverage report, like the one shown below, that reveals how well your tests exercise the source code in the program palindromechecker program. You should try to write test cases that completely cover the program's source code, producing a report like this one.

Name                              Stmts   Miss  Cover   Missing
---------------------------------------------------------------
palindromechecker/__init__.py         1      0   100%
palindromechecker/main.py            26      0   100%
palindromechecker/palindrome.py      18      0   100%
palindromechecker/util.py             4      0   100%
---------------------------------------------------------------
TOTAL                                49      0   100%

Project Reflection

Once you have finished both of the previous technical tasks, you can use a text editor to answer all of the questions in the writing/reflection.md file. For instance, you should provide the output of the Python program in a fenced code block, explain the meaning of the Python source code segments that you implemented, and answer all of the other questions about your experiences in completing this project. A specific goal of the reflection for this project is to continue to explore how test cases and test coverage information can help a developer to both establish a confidence in the correctness of and to find bugs in a Python program. Once you have finished addressing the prompts in the writing/reflection.md file that have TODO makers given as reminders, make sure that you either delete the prompt or carefully integrate a revised version of it into your writing.

Project Assessment

Since this project is an engineering effort, it is aligned with the evaluating and creating levels of Bloom's taxonomy. You can learn more about how a proactive programming expert will assess your work by examining the assessment strategy. From the start to the end of this project you may make an unlimited number of reattempts at submitting source code and technical writing that meet all aspects of the project's specification.

Project Overview

After cloning this repository to your computer, please take the following steps:

• Change into the program directory by typing cd palindromechecker.
• Install the dependencies for the project by typing poetry install.
• Run the program with its different configurations by typing:
  • poetry run palindromechecker --word civic --approach reverse
  • poetry run palindromechecker --word civic --approach recursive
  • poetry run palindromechecker --word taylor --approach reverse
  • poetry run palindromechecker --word taylor --approach recursive
• Please note that the program will not work unless you add the required source code
• Make sure to try the main tasks for automated software testing:
  • poetry run task test: run the test suite without coverage tracking
  • poetry run task coverage: run the test suite with coverage tracking
• Please note that the program will not work unless you add the required source code.
• Confirm that the program is producing the expected output described below and on the Proactive Programmers web site.
• Run the automated grading checks by typing gatorgrade --config config/gatorgrade.yml.
• You may also review the output from running GatorGrader in GitHub Actions.
• Don't forget to provide all of the required responses to the technical writing prompts in the writing/reflection.md file.
• Please make sure that you completely delete the TODO markers and their labels from all of the provided source code.
• Please make sure that you also completely delete the TODO markers and their labels from every line of the writing/reflection.md file.