Walkthrough¶

This section will show the various ways the MALAffinity class can be initialised with the user Xinil (MAL creator), and used to calculate affinity or get a comparison with the user Luna (MAL database admin).

Initialising the Class¶

The class can be initialised in either one of two ways:

Method 1: Normal initialisation¶

The class is initialised, with a “base user” passed as an argument to MALAffinity.

ma = MALAffinity("Xinil")

Method 2: Specifying a “base user” after initialisation¶

The class is initialised, with a “base user” passed sometime later after initialisation, which may be useful in scripts where creating globals inside functions or classes or different files is a pain.

ma = MALAffinity()

# This can be done anywhere, as long as it has access to ``ma``,
# but MUST be done before ``calculate_affinity`` or ``comparison``
# are called
ma.init("Xinil")

Rounding of the final affinity value¶

Note

This doesn’t affect comparison(), so don’t worry about it if you’re just using that.

Do note that the class also has a round parameter, which is used to round the final affinity value. This must be specified at class initialisation if wanted, as it isn’t available in init(). A value for this can be passed as follows:

# To round to two decimal places
ma = MALAffinity("Xinil", round=2)

# Alternatively, the following can also work, if you decide to follow
# method 2 for initialising the class
ma = MALAffinity(round=2)
ma.init("Xinil")

Doing Things with the Initialised Class¶

The initialised class, now stored in ma, can now perform the following actions:

Calculate affinity with a user¶

Note

Values may or may not be rounded, depending on the value you passed for the round parameter at class initialisation.

print(ma.calculate_affinity("Luna"))
# Affinity(affinity=37.06659111674594, shared=171)

Note that what is being returned is a namedtuple, containing the affinity and shared rated anime. This can be separated into different variables as follows:

affinity, shared = ma.calculate_affinity("Luna")

print(affinity)
# 37.06659111674594
print(shared)
# 171

Alternatively, the following also works (as this is a namedtuple):

affinity = ma.calculate_affinity("Luna")

print(affinity.affinity)
# 37.06659111674594
print(affinity.shared)
# 171

Comparing scores with a user¶

comparison = ma.comparison("Luna")

print(comparison)
# Note: this won't be prettified for you. Run it
# through a prettifier if you want it to look nice.
# {
#     1: [10, 6],
#     5: [8, 6],
#     6: [10, 7],
#     15: [7, 9],
#     16: [8, 5],
#     ...
# }

This can now be manipulated in whatever way you like, to suit your needs. I like to just get the arrays on their own, zip them and plot a graph with it.

Extras¶

Warning

These send two GET requests over to MAL in a short amount of time, with no wait inbetween them. If you’re getting in trouble with them for breaking their rate limit, you might have a few problems getting these to work without exceptions.MALRateLimitExceededError getting raised.

Note

Don’t use these if you’re planning on calculating affinity or getting a comparison again with one of the users you’ve specified when using these.

It’s better to create an instance of the MALAffinity class with said user, and using that with the other user(s) that way.

That instance will hold said users’ scores, so they won’t have to be retrieved again. See the other examples.

One-off affinity calculations¶

This is mainly used if you don’t want the “base user“‘s scores saved to a variable, and you’re only interested in the affinity with one person.

# Note that ``round`` can also be specified here if needed.
affinity, shared = calculate_affinity("Xinil", "Luna")

print(affinity)
# 37.06659111674594
print(shared)
# 171


# Alternatively...
affinity = calculate_affinity("Xinil", "Luna")

print(affinity.affinity)
# 37.06659111674594
print(affinity.shared)
# 171

One-off comparison of scores¶

This is mainly used if you don’t want the “base user“‘s scores saved to a variable, and you’re only interested in getting a comparison of scores with another user.

print(comparison("Xinil", "Luna"))

# Note: this won't be prettified for you. Run it
# through a prettifier if you want it to look nice.
# {
#     1: [10, 6],
#     5: [8, 6],
#     6: [10, 7],
#     15: [7, 9],
#     16: [8, 5],
#     ...
# }