Payments and liabilities

• Get names from names.txt
• Get transactions from transactions.txt
• The output of the program should show who owes what like so:

Alice pays $xx.xx to David. Bob pays$xx.xx to Claire.


And so on.

names.txt

Alice
Bob
Claire
David


transactions.txt

Bob paid $55.90 for petrol. Bob paid$70 for house-cleaning.
Bob paid $85.60 for lunch. Claire paid$100.10 for phone bill.
Claire paid $103.45 for dinner. Claire paid$30.80 for snacks.
David paid $170.80 for groceries. David paid$33.40 for breakfast.
David paid $63.50 for utilities.  My code works and gets the right result. I'm just wondering if there is a cleaner way. The code creates a payment object, adds people, then adds payments, then gets liabilities. import re from decimal import Decimal def filer(file): f = open(file, 'r') lines = [] for line in f.readlines(): lines.append(line.strip()) return lines def parse_lines(lines, **kwargs): compilers = kwargs.get('keys', ['money', 'name', 'bill']) parses = [] for line in lines: l1 = Parser(line, keys=compilers) parses.append(l1.get_dict()) return parses class Parser(object): patterns = {'name_pattern':'^([\w\-]+)','money_pattern':'(\d+.?\d*)','bill_pattern':"[\w'-]+\.$"}
keys        = ['money', 'name', 'bill']

def __init__(self, line, **kwargs):
if 'patterns' in kwargs:
self.patterns.update(kwargs.get('patterns'))
del kwargs['patterns']

self.__dict__.update(kwargs)

for key in self.keys:
key_str = key+'_pattern'
parser  = re.compile(self.patterns[key_str])
value   = parser.search(line)
setattr(self, key, value.group(0))

def get_dict(self):
rtn = {}
for key in self.keys:
rtn[key] = getattr(self, key)
return rtn

class Payments(object):

def __init__(self, **kwargs):
self.people         = {}
self.formatter  = "{from} ​pays​ {currency}{amount} ​to​ {to}."
self.currency   = '$' self.__dict__.update(kwargs) def add_person(self, person): self.people[str(person.name)] = person def add_payment(self, payment): person = self.people[payment['name']] person.add_to(payment) def get_liabilities(self): liabilities = [] for name, person in self.people.items(): person.set_share(len(self.people.items())) for name, person in self.people.items(): """gets share & sets it against each person in the group""" person.set_liability(self.people, self.currency) liabilities += person.liabilities return liabilities def print_liabilities(self): liabilities = [] for liability in self.get_liabilities(): liabilities.append(self.formatter.format(**liability)) return liabilities class Person(object): def __init__(self, **kwargs): self.name = "" self.items = [] self.paid = 0 self.share = 0 self.liabilities = [] self.__dict__.update(kwargs) def add_to(self, payment): """ payment must have keys: 'name', 'money'""" if payment['name'] == self.name: self.items.append(payment) def _get_paid(self): balance = 0 for item in self.items: amount = Decimal(item['money'],2) balance += amount return Decimal(balance, 2) def set_share(self, total_people): """total amount paid is divided by the number of people to get the liabilities of each person""" self.paid = self._get_paid() self.share = round(self.paid/Decimal(total_people), 2) def _set_extras(self, liability, keys): """sets extra properties""" for key in keys: if hasattr(self, key): liab_dict[key] = getattr(self, key) def set_liability(self, people, currency): """if owed is share is greater than owed, name needs to pay this""" for name, person in people.items(): if self.name != name: """if owed is greater than what I have paid then add to liabilities""" diff = self.share - person.share if diff < 0: liab_dict = {'from':self.name,'to': name,'amount':-diff, 'currency':currency } self.liabilities.append(liab_dict) class PaymentBuilder(object): people = [] def __init__(self, **kwargs): transactions = kwargs.get('transaction_file','./transactions.txt') names = kwargs.get('names_file','./names.txt') self.payments = Payments() self.trans = parse_lines(filer(transactions)) self.names = filer(names) for name in self.names: self.payments.add_person(Person(name=name)) for tran in self.trans: self.payments.add_payment(tran) def liabilities(self): return [ liability for liability in self.payments.print_liabilities()]  To run just init PageBuilder then get liabilities. Please be sure to place the names.txt and transactions.txt in the root folder otherwise pass locations. For specific location file use: PaymentBuilder(transaction_file='/var/location/filename.txt') payments = PaymentBuilder() for line in payments.liabilities(): print(line)  Output: Claire ​pays​$8.33 ​to​ David.
Bob ​pays​ $5.71 ​to​ Claire. Bob ​pays​$14.04 ​to​ David.
Alice ​pays​ $58.59 ​to​ Claire. Alice ​pays​$66.92 ​to​ David.
Alice ​pays​ $52.88 ​to​ Bob.  • I think you should write in your description (rather than having people deduce from your code) just what process you want the code to perform on the data, and what output the example data should give and why. – Acccumulation Feb 13 '18 at 16:05 • The motivation for the output still isn't clear. Why those particular numbers? Bob is paying$14.04 to David, but he's also paying $5.71 to Claire who pays$8.33 to David. Why not have Bob pay $19.75 to David and nothing to Claire, and have Claire pay$2.62 to David? Everyone ends up with the same amount of money. Do you want this particular output, or will any output that results in the same net money do? – Acccumulation Feb 13 '18 at 20:09

Low hanging fruits

You should read PEP8 to make your code look more like Python code to others. You have a few violations:

• spacing around operators (+, ,, and = mostly);
• blank lines around top-level code;
• differences between comments and docstrings.

There is also this **kwargs thing… I don't get why you use it in most of your functions and constructors. You don't need variable number of named arguments, all you need is a default value for some of them: use the more idiomatic

def __init__(self, transactions_file='./transactions.txt', names_file='./names.txt'):


(for PaymentBuilder) instead.

You should also use a with statement to manage your files instead of manually closing them; which you forgot to do anyway…

Lastly, the Person._set_extras method is never called and can be safely removed (especially since it uses an undefined variable).

Stop writing classes

Two of your classes are only an __init__ and a single method. These should be functions instead, as there is not really any state that we need to manipulate.

And as we will see later, the other two can be simplified to a few lines as well so there really is no need into using classes here: the whole point of Person is only to be a dictionary value, and Payments is the holding dictionary. Keep it simple, use dictionaries instead.

The whole logic of PaymentBuilder.liabilities() can be expressed as follow, from your code:

• For each name in the file, initialise a dict entry to the empty list to store future transactions
• For each transaction in the file, store the amount spend into the right name in the aforementioned dictionary
• For each entry in the dictionary, compute the share spent by the person
• For each couple of persons, compute the difference in spent shares and, if the first owe something to the second, print that information.

Each of these steps can be seen as a dict-comprehension or a for-loop over a dictionary content.

Use generators

Instead of building lists and appending to them in order to build other lists by appending to them… You can reduce your memory footprint by using generators.

This will allow you to parse files one line at a time, for instance, without having to read them upfront. Or print liabilities one by one without having to compute them all upfront either.

Proposed improvements

import re
from decimal import Decimal

def filer(filename):
with open(filename, 'r') as f:
yield from map(str.strip, f)

def parse_line(line, patterns):
return {
key: parser.search(line).group(0)
for key, parser in patterns.items()
}

def parse_lines(lines, patterns=None):
if patterns is None:
patterns = {
'name': re.compile('^([\w\-]+)'),
'money': re.compile('(\d+.?\d*)'),
'bill': re.compile("[\w'-]+\.$"), } yield from (parse_line(line, patterns) for line in lines) def liabilities(transactions_file='./transactions.txt', names_file='./names.txt', currency='$'):
persons = {name: [] for name in filer(names_file)}

for transaction in parse_lines(filer(transactions_file)):
persons[transaction['name']].append(transaction['money'])

total_people = Decimal(len(persons))
shares = {
name: round(sum(Decimal(p) for p in paid) / total_people, 2)
for name, paid in persons.items()
}

for name, share in shares.items():
for other, other_share in shares.items():
if name == other:
continue
difference = share - other_share
if difference < 0:
yield '{debitor} pays {currency}{amount} to {creditor}.'.format(
currency=currency,
amount=-difference,
debitor=name, creditor=other)

if __name__ == '__main__':
for line in liabilities():
print(line)

• Nice!! The classes are really to make the code scallable. Add extra features. Also the _add_extras function, I was hoping to allow the formatter template to allow a custom template & add key-value to dict to create a custom output – H Bensiali Feb 13 '18 at 21:58
• @HBensiali you can always add new features when you need them, but I have the feeling that for the most part You Ain't Gonna Need It (the complexity of those classes) – 301_Moved_Permanently Feb 13 '18 at 22:04
• @t3chb0t how on Earth did you understand that from the video. If you end up with a god method, it's only because you started with a god class to start with. The video only boils down to "a class containing only init plus a single method should be a function to avoid cluttering the calling code" – 301_Moved_Permanently Feb 13 '18 at 22:15
• @Graipher The yield from is necessary in filer because if you return map(…) then the with block is exited, the file closed and any iteration over the map will raise an IOError. The second one is more to stay consistent and because I also don't want to have to think about such issue as regard to functions and generator composition. – 301_Moved_Permanently Feb 14 '18 at 11:01
• @Graipher As said above, didn't try it, don't know (and did't want to think about) if it have some side effects pertaining to the use of the provided map, and keeping consistency with the filer function above. Besides, it is clearer to me that I get a generator when using a function that yield from rather than some that return <a generator expression> – 301_Moved_Permanently Feb 14 '18 at 11:05

Design

I echo the advice from @MathiasEttinger to stop writing classes. I think that your solution is over-engineered. However, at the same time, your design is fragile and prone to misuse. Some observations about your design:

• You rely on a specific sequence of mutations to be performed, particularly in Payments.get_liabilities():

def get_liabilities(self):
liabilities     = []
for name, person in self.people.items():
person.set_share(len(self.people.items()))

for name, person in self.people.items():
"""gets share & sets it against each person in the group"""
person.set_liability(self.people, self.currency)
liabilities += person.liabilities

return liabilities


So, before get_liabilities() is called, the people must already have had their expenses added. Then, within person.set_liability(), you expect every other person's .share to already have been computed. That correct usage of the Person class is not apparent from any of the documentation of the Person class.

(By the way, len(self.people) would suffice in the excerpt above; len(self.people.items()) is overkill.)

• The calculation actually involves a nested for-loop, but the way it works is obscured due to the fact that the outer loop is in Payments.get_liabilities(), and the inner loop is in Person.set_liability().

• Payments.print_liabilities() is misleading. It never prints anything!

• The multi-currency support isn't effective. It's basically an exercise in parameter-passing, after setting the hard-coded self.currency = '$' in the constructor of the Payments class. If you had inferred the $ symbol from parsing transactions.txt and passed it along, then that would actually be useful. In any case, currency formatting can be complicated. Some currency symbols are, for example, traditionally placed after the number. In summary, this simplistic attempt is not worthwhile. You'd be better off hard-coding the $ sign in the formatter string. • Person._set_extras() is unused (and if it were used, would be a sign of poor class design). • The Parser is needlessly complex. You could accomplish the same thing using just one regular expression with named capture groups. It should just be hard-coded; there is no advantage to making the sub-expressions configurable. Style • A lot of the code could be shortened by writing comprehensions instead of for loops. For example, filer(), Parser.get_dict(), Payments.print_liabilities(), and Person._get_paid() could each be one-liners (or nearly so). On the other hand, this is a completely redundant list comprehension: def liabilities(self): return [ liability for liability in self.payments.print_liabilities()]  • Don't abuse **kwargs. Your PaymentBuilder constructor should take two parameters (with default values). Your parse_lines() function should accept one list. As for your Parser constructor, I have no idea what magic it's trying to apply. (Anyway, as I mentioned above, your Parser should just be one hard-coded regular expression.) • Use r'raw strings' for regular expressions that contain backslashes, to avoid the possibility of the backslashes being misinterpreted. • Write """docstrings""" for all of your methods. But don't write docstrings where they are actually # code comments. Suggested solution I'd just write two functions, plus a bit of glue code to call the functions and print out the results. Note that all of the decimal rounding occurs in the formatter. import re from decimal import Decimal def parse_expenses(names_file, transactions_file): """ Parse a file containing transactions to obtain a dict listing the total expenses incurred by each person listed in the names file. names_file should be a path to a text file, containing one name per line. transactions_file should be a path to a text file, with each line of the form "John paid$1.23 for blah".
"""
regex = re.compile(r'^(?P<name>[\w-]+).*?\$(?P<amount>\d+.?\d*)') with open(names_file) as f: expenses = {line.strip(): Decimal('0') for line in f} with open(transactions_file) as f: for line in f: match = regex.match(line) if not match or match.group('name') not in expenses: raise ValueError('Bad transaction: "{0}"'.format(line.strip())) expenses[match.group('name')] += Decimal(match.group('amount')) return expenses def equalization_payments(expenses): """ Given a dictionary that maps names to expenses, generate (payer, payee, amount) tuples that would result in the expenses being equalized. """ n = len(expenses) for debtor, debt in expenses.items(): for creditor, credit in expenses.items(): diff = credit - debt if diff > 0: yield debtor, creditor, diff / n if __name__ == '__main__': expenses = parse_expenses('names.txt', 'transactions.txt') for payer, payee, amount in equalization_payments(expenses): print('{payer} pays${amount:0.2f} to {payee}.'.format(
payer=payer, payee=payee, amount=amount
))

• I wish i could give u both an accepted answer. I was kinda humbled today. Thank you both – H Bensiali Feb 14 '18 at 1:31
• I need to move away from a strict oop class based coding pratice. A lot of my code was taken from libraries written in github – H Bensiali Feb 14 '18 at 1:34