Python Practice: Autocomplete

A common feature in websites is “autocomplete”. Typically, a user is entering input into a form field, and the system provides a list of suggested completions. Each new character typed reduces the list of suggestions. The completions are typically drawn from a vocabulary of available values. If the user is typing a sequence that is not matched in the list of available values, no completions are suggested.

Your Task

Write a callable Python class which will implement autocomplete functionality. Your class should take a list of words to be a vocabulary as an argument on initialization. It should also accept a max_completions argument, which controls the maximum number of suggested completions for a given string. The max_completions argument should default to 5.

The input to the call method for the class will be the string the user has typed. When called, this class should return a list of at most max_completions suggested words. If there are more available completions than allowed, you are free to decide which to return. If there are no completions available, you should return an empty list. Your class should handle inappropriate inputs correctly.

In the end, your class should be usable like so:

>>> from autocomplete import AutoCompleter
>>> vocabulary = ['fix', 'fax', 'fit', 'fist', 'full', 'finch', 'final', 'finial']
>>> complete_me = AutoCompleter(vocabulary, max_completions=4)
>>> complete_me('f')
['fix', 'fax', 'fit', 'fist']
>>> complete_me('fi')
['fix', 'fit', 'fist', 'finch']
>>> complete_me('fin')
['finch', 'final', 'finial']
>>> complete_me('finally')
[]

Stretch Goal

Update the __init__ method of your class to accept a filename instead of a list. If the provided value is a list, then operate as before. If it is a file, then the vocabulary should be read from the file. You may assume that the file is formatted with one word per line. You may assume that there are no blank lines in the file. You may not assume that there is no extra whitespace on any line.

Submitting Your Work

Create a autocomplete branch in your code-katas repository. Do all of your work on this branch.

Add documentation about your code in the repo’s README.md. Write appropriate tests for your code, and save them in a test_autocomplete.py file.

After you’ve pushed your code solution over into GitHub, send a pull request to your master branch. Submit the URL of that pull request to Canvas.

Use the comment box in Canvas to talk about your thought process, as well as any difficulty you had with this code kata.