Congratulations! You’ve now acquired a thorough understanding of structural pattern matching in Python. By mastering the match statement and case clauses, you’ve unlocked powerful tools for writing more concise and readable code.

Along the way, you explored a wide variety of pattern types, from simple literals and value patterns to more complex sequences, mappings, and class patterns. You’ve also learned how to customize pattern matching for user-defined classes so you can extend this powerful feature to your own types.

In this video course, you’ve:

Mastered the syntax of the match statement and case clauses
Explored various types of patterns supported by Python
Learned about guards, unions, aliases, and name binding
Extracted values from deeply nested hierarchical data structures
Customized pattern matching for user-defined classes
Identified and avoided common pitfalls in Python’s pattern matching

With this knowledge in your toolkit, you can now leverage structural pattern matching to make your Python code more declarative and expressive. Whether you’re validating data, implementing control flow, or just aiming to write cleaner, more maintainable code, pattern matching can be a powerful ally.

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Course Slides (.pdf)

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Sample Code (.zip)

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Congratulations, you made it to the end of the course! What’s your #1 takeaway or favorite thing you learned? How are you going to put your newfound skills to use? Leave a comment in the discussion section and let us know.

00:00 And here we find ourselves, finally, at the end of the course. You now know the how, when, where, and why to use structural pattern matching, and you built some cool projects along the way.

00:11 In this course, you’ve learned to master the syntax of the match statement and case clauses to understand the different types of patterns you can build in Python.

00:19 You’ve become skilled at leveraging advanced pattern matching techniques. You’ve developed a deep understanding of the pitfalls and limitations of pattern matching, and you’ve worked on building practical examples to cement your learnings.

00:31 Congratulations. Why not continue your learning journey with one of these courses? If you’d like to learn about another fairly recent Python feature, check out The Walrus Operator: Python’s Assignment Expressions.

00:44 You’ve used pattern matching for data validation, but did you know there’s actually a Python library dedicated to validating data? To learn more, I recommend Pydantic: Simplifying Data Validation in Python. And if the last lesson got you curious about the ways Python differs from other programming languages, Python vs JavaScript for Pythonistas will be right up your alley.

01:04 In fact, I’d say one of the best ways to become a better Python developer can be by learning about other programming languages. And that’s all! Once again, my name is Joseph and thank you for completing this video course.

bhchurch6 on March 19, 2025

I attemped to execute the curl command from the last few lessons using my Mac terminal. I dropped the ‘jq’ portion of the command since I did not have it installed. I ran the command as:

$ curl -s 'https://api.github.com/repos/python/cypthon/events' | head -n 48

What I received back was the following:

{
  "message": "Not Found",
  "documentation_url": "https://docs.github.com/rest/activity/events#list-repository-events",
  "status": "404"
}

I tried accessing the link via my browser and got the same result. Based upon the documentation I received when I just executed the command:

$ curl -s 'https://api.github.com/' | head -n 48'

I think I copied the URL correctly. Is there something wrong in the command that I missed? There is a URL in the response from the command that is ‘api.github.com/events’. However it does not specify an {owner} or {repos}.

Thank you, Bruce

Bartosz Zaczyński RP Team on March 20, 2025

@bhchurch6 When you follow the provided link with the GitHub API documentation, you’ll find that the /events endpoint requires authentication:

$ curl -L \
  -H "Accept: application/vnd.github+json" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer <YOUR-TOKEN>" \
  -H "X-GitHub-Api-Version: 2022-11-28" \
  https://api.github.com/repos/OWNER/REPO/events

You can generate a fine-grained personal access token required by GitHub here: github.com/settings/personal-access-tokens/new

In the next step, you’ll need to copy your new token and store it safely, as GitHub will never show it to you again!

Once you have your token, you can use it along with the curl command. For example, here’s mine:

$ curl -L \
  -H "Accept: application/vnd.github+json" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer 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" \
  -H "X-GitHub-Api-Version: 2022-11-28" \
  https://api.github.com/repos/python/cpython/events
[
  {
    "id": "47760096152",
    "type": "WatchEvent",
    "actor": {
      "id": 149587415,
      "login": "Ndgt",
      "display_login": "Ndgt",
      "gravatar_id": "",
      "url": "https://api.github.com/users/Ndgt",
      "avatar_url": "https://avatars.githubusercontent.com/u/149587415?"
    },
    "repo": {
      "id": 81598961,
      "name": "python/cpython",
      "url": "https://api.github.com/repos/python/cpython"
    },
    "payload": {
      "action": "started"
    },
    "public": true,
    "created_at": "2025-03-20T04:24:35Z",
    "org": {
      "id": 1525981,
      "login": "python",
      "gravatar_id": "",
      "url": "https://api.github.com/orgs/python",
      "avatar_url": "https://avatars.githubusercontent.com/u/1525981?"
    }
  },
  (...)
]

Now, you’re getting the JSON output you were looking for.

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Using Structural Pattern Matching in Python (Summary)