Calendar ToDO App

Lets make a To-Do App that prompts you to do a task on the date it's due.

In this short lesson you will learn:

How to interact with files
How to use bash/shell scripting
How to use Python
Learn to use Python arrays
How to process dates (tricky but will already start you as a technical dev)

Why file system is so important?

Learning to read, write and understand the file system is the most important thing as no matter what challenge you face in the future, even if your understanding is limited; you can always perform the equivelant functions by reading and writing to files.

Objectives sudo code

Create a text file on your machine, call it schedule.txt
Populate that file with a list of activities and don't forget the date
Make sure the format is machine readable i.e. follow the convention below exactly.

05-01-2022, pay council tax
06-01-2022, buy birthday present for mum

Formatting notes:

each line is a activity
each line has a date and a task seperated by a comma

When we build the program it will:

So the program will read each line
it will split items based on comma
first item is the date, second item is the activity
If there is a problem, skip the line and return error

Architecture

Understanding Dates

python has a library called datetime, we can use this to get the currenttime using datetime.now() its a complex object with lots to learn, so the easiest thing for us is to simply convert it to a string, so we can use todays date to compare with dates in the file.

import datetime

# this gets the date as a complex object 
now = datetime.datetime.now()

# this converts that object (we called now) to a string called todaysDate
todaysDate = now.strftime("%d-%m-%Y")

now = datetime.datetime.now()
print(now)

2022-01-15 18:55:39.306905

print(todaysDate)

15-01-2022

learning notes

We used a program to draw out the rough architecture of our calendar service we called calendarApp https://www.draw.io/
We used notepad++ and opened the folder as a project.
- Sublime is a good and better program
- but we decided pycharm is too complex and not really good for beginners

command line

by entering cmd in the search we can open command line, this is the proper way to interact with python.

# change directory with cd
cd
# example, lets change directory to desktop
cd Desktop 

# get a list of files in current directory with dir

dir

# create a new folder with mkdir 

mkdir adamsNewFolder

# echo something to the screen 

echo hi

# create a file 

echo '' > myNewFile.txt

working with Lists

we sometimes use the word arrays and matrix interchangably.
A list is just a grouping of items strings, ints or other stuff
we use lists because we can group lots of items together and iterate them in a for loop, this lets us process large volumes of data

myFruit = ['apple','banana','grape','pear']

myFruit = ['apple','banana','grape','pear']

delete an item

myFruit.pop(0)

myFruit.pop(0)

'apple'

myFruit

['banana', 'grape', 'pear']

!export PATH=/Library/TeX/texbin:$PATH

murchie85/calendarApp_Tutorial