Lecture step 3: buy the most expensive affordable upgrade

What the assignment asks

Every 5 seconds, look at the right-hand pane, find the upgrades you can afford, and buy the most expensive one. For example, with 105 cookies both Cursor (15) and Grandma (100) are affordable, so the bot buys Grandma. The hints point to split, strip and replace for turning the page text into numbers.

What we built

parse_amount and parse_cookie_count turn page text into numbers. They remove the word cookies, drop everything after per second, take away the thousands commas with replace, and understand words such as 1.4 million. Examples: 5,000 cookies gives 5000; 1.235 and million cookies on two lines gives 1,235,000.
SeleniumGame.upgrades reads every visible product: its id, its name and its price.
choose_most_expensive_affordable(upgrades, cookies) is a pure function: of the upgrades whose price is not above the cookies, return the most expensive one, or nothing. It is tested with the example above (105 cookies gives Grandma).
click_and_buy keeps clicking, and when check_interval_seconds (5 by default) have passed it reads the count, chooses, and buys.
In a 45 second container run the bot bought 8 upgrades, and the screenshot shows the Cursors and Grandmas it owns.

What we gained in this step

The hard part is the text, not the click. The same number appears as 120, 5,000, 1.4 million and on two lines. Parsing is a small pure function with many test cases, so it is safe to change.
Keep the rule away from the browser. "Buy the most expensive affordable upgrade" is one function that knows nothing about Selenium. That is why step 5 could add a second rule without touching the browser code.
Do not count a purchase you did not make. The first version logged a purchase whenever it clicked. A real run showed the click did not always reach the product, so buy now says whether it did, and only real purchases are counted (see Step 4).

Cookie Clicker Bot

Language

Cookie Clicker Bot, a solution to day 48 of Udemy 100 Days of Code. English · Dansk · Bahasa Malaysia