Pythons Project for beginners - Post 37: Simple Tip Calculator

Let's build a Simple Tip Calculator. This is a very practical, real-world application that's perfect for beginners to practice getting numeric input, performing percentage calculations, and formatting output.

First, here is the explanation of how the project is built.

How the "Simple Tip Calculator" is Made

1. The Core Idea: The goal is to create a command-line tool that calculates the tip for a bill, the total amount including the tip, and how much each person should pay if the bill is split.

2. Getting User Input Safely: The program needs three pieces of information from the user:

   • The total bill amount.

   • The percentage of the tip they would like to leave (e.g., 15, 18, 20).

   • The number of people to split the bill between. Since all of these inputs must be numbers, we will wrap each input() call in a try...except ValueError block. This ensures the program won't crash if the user enters text instead of a number.

3. The Core Logic - The Calculations:

   • Tip Amount: We calculate the tip amount by first converting the tip percentage into a decimal (by dividing it by 100) and then multiplying it by the bill amount. The formula is: tip_amount = bill * (tip_percentage / 100).

   • Total Bill: The final bill is simply the original bill plus the tip amount: total_bill = bill + tip_amount.

   • Amount Per Person: To find out how much each person owes, we divide the total bill by the number of people: amount_per_person = total_bill / number_of_people.

4. Displaying the Results: Currency should always be displayed with two decimal places. We'll use formatted f-strings to present the results to the user in a clean and readable way. For example, f"${total_bill:.2f}" will format the total bill as a currency value rounded to two decimal places. We will clearly show the tip amount, the total bill, and the amount per person.