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Strategy Pattern

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This design pattern is called Strategy Pattern. It is used to define a family of algorithms, encapsulates each one, and make them interchangeable. Strategy design pattern lets an algorithm vary independently from clients that use it.

For example, animals can “walk” in many different ways. Walking could be considered a strategy that is implemented by different types of animals: 

from types import MethodType

class Animal(object):
    
    def __init__(self, *args, **kwargs):
        self.name = kwargs.pop('name', None) or 'Animal'
        if kwargs.get('walk', None):
            self.walk = MethodType(kwargs.pop('walk'), self)

    def walk(self):
        """
        Cause animal instance to walk
        
        Walking funcionallity is a strategy, and is intended to
        be implemented separately by different types of animals.
        """
        message = '{} should implement a walk method'.format(
            self.__class__.__name__)
        raise NotImplementedError(message)

# Here are some different walking algorithms that can be used with Animal
def snake_walk(self):
    print('I am slithering side to side because I am a {}.'.format(self.name))

def four_legged_animal_walk(self):
    print('I am using all four of my legs to walk because I am a(n) {}.'.format(
        self.name))

def two_legged_animal_walk(self):
    print('I am standing up on my two legs to walk because I am a {}.'.format(
        self.name))

Running this example would produce the following output: 

generic_animal = Animal()
king_cobra = Animal(name='King Cobra', walk=snake_walk)
elephant = Animal(name='Elephant', walk=four_legged_animal_walk)
kangaroo = Animal(name='Kangaroo', walk=two_legged_animal_walk)

kangaroo.walk()
elephant.walk()
king_cobra.walk()
# This one will Raise a NotImplementedError to let the programmer
# know that the walk method is intended to be used as a strategy.
generic_animal.walk()

    # OUTPUT:
    #
    # I am standing up on my two legs to walk because I am a Kangaroo.
    # I am using all four of my legs to walk because I am a(n) Elephant.
    # I am slithering side to side because I am a King Cobra.
    # Traceback (most recent call last):
    #   File "./strategy.py", line 56, in <module>
    #     generic_animal.walk()
    #   File "./strategy.py", line 30, in walk
    #     raise NotImplementedError(message)
    # NotImplementedError: Animal should implement a walk method

Note that in languages like C++ or Java, this pattern is implemented using an abstract class or an interface to define a a strategy. In Python it makes more sense to just define some functions externally that can be added dynamically to a class using types.MethodType.

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Design Patterns:
* Introduction to design patterns and Singleton Pattern
* Strategy Pattern
* Proxy
Table Of Contents
0 Getting Started
1 List comprehension
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40 Virtual environments
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64 Recursion
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66 dis module
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68 pip PyPI Package Manager
69 locale module
70 Exceptions
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72 deque module
73 Distributing self-contained applications
74 Property Objects
75 Overloading
76 Debugging
77 Reading and Writing CSV
78 Dynamic code execution with exec and eval
79 PyInstaller - Distributing Python Code
80 Iterables and Iterators
81 Data Visualization
82 The interpreter command line console
83 args and kwargs
84 functools module
85 Garbage Collection
86 Indentation
87 Security and Cryptograhy
88 Pickle data serialization
89 urllib
90 Binary Data
91 Python and Excel
92 Idioms
93 Method Overriding
94 Difference between a module and a package
95 Data Serialization
96 Python Concurrency
97 RabbitMQ using AMQPStorm
98 PostgreSQL
99 Descriptor
100 Common Pitfalls
101 Multiprocessing
102 Creating temporary files with tempfile
103 Working with ZIP files
104 Stack
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106 User-Defined Methods
107 Working around Global Interpreter Lock
108 Deployment using conda
109 Logging
110 Processes and Threads
111 os module
112 Comments and documentation
113 Database Access
114 Python HTTP Server
115 Alternatives to switch statement from other languages
116 List destructuring
117 Accessing Python source code and bytecode
118 Mixins
119 Attribute Access
120 ArcPy
121 Python Anti-Patterns
122 Plugin and Extension Classes
123 Websockets
124 Immutable data types
125 String representations of class
126 Arrays
127 Operator Precedence
128 Polymorphism
129 Alternative Python implementations
130 List Comprehensions
131 Web Server Gateway Intrerface WSGI
132 2to3 tool
133 Abstract Syntax Tree
134 Abstract Base Classes
135 Unicode
136 ssh in Python
137 Serial Communication with pyserial
138 Neo4j
139 Performance optimization
140 Curses
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142 pass statement
143 Testing with py.test
144 Date Formatting
145 heapq
146 tkinter
147 CLI subcommands
148 Defining functions with list arguments
149 SQLite3 module
150 Persistence with pickle
151 Connecting to SQL Server
152 Design Patterns
153 Multidimensional arrays
154 Audio
155 pyglet
156 queue module
157 ijson
158 webbrowser module
159 base64 module
160 Flask
161 Groupby
162 Sockets and Message Encryption / Decryption
163 pygame
164 Input Subset and Output External Data Files using Pandas
165 hashlib
166 Gzip
167 ctypes
168 Creating a Windows Service
169 Mutable vs. Immutable
170 configparser
171 Common Exceptions
172 Optical Character Recognition OCR
173 Python Data Types
174 Partial functions
175 Generating graphs
176 Unzipping Files
177 Functional Programming
178 Python Virtual Environment - virtualenv
179 sys module
180 virtual environment with virtualenvwrapper
181 virtualenvwrapper on Windows
182 Python Requests Post
183 Plotting with Matplotlib
184 Python Lex-Yacc
185 pyaudio
186 shelve
187 pip and PyPI Package Manager
188 Writing to CSV from String or List
189 Raise Custom Errors Exceptions
190 Using loops within functions
191 Contributors