Most Active Cookie Finder

Coding Overview

This Repo consists of a Python script, cookie_finder.py, which processes a cookie log file in CSV format and returns the most active cookie for a specified date. The script is designed to be run from the command line, taking two parameters: the path to the CSV file (-f) and the date for which the most active cookie is sought (-d).

Requirements

• Python 3.x

Installation

No additional installation is required, as the script uses standard Python libraries.

Usage

To run the script, open your terminal and navigate to the directory containing cookie_finder.py. Ensure that your cookie log file (in CSV format) is accessible.

The script can be executed with the following command:

python cookie_finder.py -f [path_to_cookie_log.csv] -d [date]

Replace [path_to_cookie_log.csv] with the path to your cookie log file and [date] with the date you're interested in, formatted as YYYY-MM-DD.

For example:

python cookie_finder.py -f cookie_log.csv -d 2018-12-09

Sample Data

A sample cookie log file named cookie_log.csv is provided for testing purposes.

Functionality

• Parsing Command Line Arguments: The script uses argparse to handle command-line arguments for the filename and date.
• Reading the Log File: It reads the CSV file and extracts cookie and timestamp information.
• Filtering and Counting Cookies: The script filters cookies based on the specified date and counts their occurrences.
• Identifying Most Active Cookie(s): It identifies the cookie(s) that appear the most on the given date and prints them to stdout.
• Error Handling: Basic error handling is implemented for file reading and argument parsing.

Testing

The script can be tested with different CSV files and dates to ensure it handles various scenarios correctly. A separate file for unit tests can be created as test_cookie_finder.py.