Python Week 3 Project Review: Price Scraper + Currency Converter

[bonareri]

Requirements Checklist

Requirement	Marks
Scrape at least 10 products using requests and BeautifulSoup	25/25
Store product name and original price	15/15
Use a currency conversion API	20/20
Convert prices correctly	15/15
Save data to CSV or JSON	15/15
Display products in a readable table using pandas/tabulate	15/15
Error handling for connection issues	14/15
Code quality, organization, and readability	2/5
Optional extensions (currency selection, timestamp, visualization)	0/5
Total	116/125

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Strengths

• Successfully scraped more than the required 10 books from the Books to Scrape website.
• Retrieved live exchange rates using a valid Exchange Rate API.
• Correctly converted book prices from GBP to KES.
• Cleaned the scraped price data using regular expressions.
• Displayed the final dataset in a clean and readable table using pandas.
• Successfully exported the results to a CSV file.
• Included exception handling for both the API request and website request.
• Implemented a fallback exchange rate if the API request failed, ensuring the program could still run.
• Used descriptive print statements to clearly indicate the progress of each step, making the program easy to follow.

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Areas for Improvement

1. Code Organization

Most of the code is written in the global scope. Organizing the program into reusable functions such as:

fetch_exchange_rate()
scrape_books()
display_results()
save_to_csv()
main()

would improve readability, maintainability, and make future enhancements easier.

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2. Unused Imports

The following imports are not used in the project:

import csv
import json

Removing unused imports would improve code cleanliness.

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3. Error Handling

The project includes good error handling for network requests. However, using:

exit()

to terminate the program after a failed website request is not ideal. Returning from a main() function or handling the failure more gracefully would make the application more robust.

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4. Optional Extensions

The assignment suggested implementing additional features such as:

• Allowing users to choose the currencies.
• Adding a timestamp to the output.
• Plotting a bar chart comparing original and converted prices.

None of these optional extensions were implemented.

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Optional Extensions

Extension	Status
User chooses currencies	Not implemented
Timestamp added to output	Not implemented
Bar chart comparing original and converted prices	Not implemented

Final Score: 116/125