How to use structural pattern matching in Python

Python, for all its power and popularity, has long lacked a form of flow control found in other languages—a way to take a value and match it elegantly against one of a number of possible conditions. In C and C++, it’s the switch/case construction; in Rust, it’s called “pattern matching.”

The traditional ways to do this in Python aren’t elegant. One is to write an if/elif/else chain of expressions. The other is to store values to match as keys in a dictionary, then use the values to take an action—e.g., store a function as a value and use the key or some other variable as input. In many cases this works well, but can be cumbersome to construct and maintain.

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Author: . [Source Link (*), InfoWorld]

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