Python state-machine design

Question

Related to this Stack Overflow question (C state-machine design), could you Stack Overflow folks share your Python state-machine design techniques

Answer 1

The following code is a really simple solution. The only interesting part is:

   def next_state(self,cls):
      self.__class__ = cls

All the logic for each state is contained in a separate class. The 'state' is changed by replacing the '__class__' of the running instance.

#!/usr/bin/env python

class State(object):
   call = 0 # shared state variable
   def next_state(self,cls):
      print '-> %s' % (cls.__name__,),
      self.__class__ = cls

   def show_state(self,i):
      print '%2d:%2d:%s' % (self.call,i,self.__class__.__name__),

class State1(State):
   __call = 0  # state variable
   def __call__(self,ok):
      self.show_state(self.__call)
      self.call += 1
      self.__call += 1
      # transition
      if ok: self.next_state(State2)
      print '' # force new line

class State2(State):
   __call = 0
   def __call__(self,ok):
      self.show_state(self.__call)
      self.call += 1
      self.__call += 1
      # transition
      if ok: self.next_state(State3)
      else: self.next_state(State1)
      print '' # force new line

class State3(State):
   __call = 0
   def __call__(self,ok):
      self.show_state(self.__call)
      self.call += 1
      self.__call += 1
      # transition
      if not ok: self.next_state(State2)
      print '' # force new line

if __name__ == '__main__':
   sm = State1()
   for v in [1,1,1,0,0,0,1,1,0,1,1,0,0,1,0,0,1,0,0]:
      sm(v)
   print '---------'
   print vars(sm

Result:

 0: 0:State1 -> State2 
 1: 0:State2 -> State3 
 2: 0:State3 
 3: 1:State3 -> State2 
 4: 1:State2 -> State1 
 5: 1:State1 
 6: 2:State1 -> State2 
 7: 2:State2 -> State3 
 8: 2:State3 -> State2 
 9: 3:State2 -> State3 
10: 3:State3 
11: 4:State3 -> State2 
12: 4:State2 -> State1 
13: 3:State1 -> State2 
14: 5:State2 -> State1 
15: 4:State1 
16: 5:State1 -> State2 
17: 6:State2 -> State1 
18: 6:State1 
---------
{'_State1__call': 7, 'call': 19, '_State3__call': 5, '_State2__call': 7}

Answer 2

Other related projects:

• http://fsme.sourceforge.net/

• https://code.google.com/p/visio2python/

You can paint state-machine and then use it in your code.

Answer 3

I wouldn't think to reach for a finite state machine for handling XML. The usual way to do this, I think, is to use a stack:

class TrackInfoHandler(object):
    def __init__(self):
        self._stack=[]

    ## ================================== Event callbacks

    def startElement(self, name, attrs):
        cls = self.elementClasses[name]
        self._stack.append(cls(**attrs))

    def characters(self, ch):
        self._stack[-1].addCharacters(ch)

    def endElement(self, name):
        e = self._stack.pop()
        e.close()
        if self._stack:
            self._stack[-1].addElement(e)

For each kind of element, you just need a class that supports the addCharacters, addElement, and close methods.

EDIT: To clarify, yes I do mean to argue that finite state machines are usually the wrong answer, that as a general-purpose programming technique they're rubbish and you should stay away.

There are a few really well-understood, cleanly-delineated problems for which FSMs are a nice solution. lex, for example, is good stuff.

That said, FSMs typically don't cope well with change. Suppose someday you want to add a bit of state, perhaps a "have we seen element X yet?" flag. In the code above, you add a boolean attribute to the appropriate element class and you're done. In a finite state machine, you double the number of states and transitions.

Problems that require finite state at first very often evolve to require even more state, like maybe a number, at which point either your FSM scheme is toast, or worse, you evolve it into some kind of generalized state machine, and at that point you're really in trouble. The further you go, the more your rules start to act like code—but code in a slow interpreted language you invented that nobody else knows, for which there's no debugger and no tools.

Answer 4

There is this design pattern for using decorators to implement state machines. From the description on the page:

Decorators are used to specify which methods are the event handlers for the class.

There is example code on the page as well (it is quite long so I won't paste it here).

Answer 5

I would definitely not recommend implementing such a well known pattern yourself. Just go for an open source implementation like transitions and wrap another class around it if you need custom features. In this post I explain why I prefer this particular implementation and its features.

Answer 6

In the April, 2009 issue of Python Magazine, I wrote an article on embedding a State DSL within Python, using pyparsing and imputil. This code would allow you to write the module trafficLight.pystate:

# trafficLight.pystate

# define state machine
statemachine TrafficLight:
    Red -> Green
    Green -> Yellow
    Yellow -> Red

# define some class level constants
Red.carsCanGo = False
Yellow.carsCanGo = True
Green.carsCanGo = True

Red.delay = wait(20)
Yellow.delay = wait(3)
Green.delay = wait(15)

and the DSL compiler would create all the necessary TrafficLight, Red, Yellow, and Green classes, and the proper state transition methods. Code could call these classes using something like this:

import statemachine
import trafficLight

tl = trafficLight.Red()
for i in range(6):
    print tl, "GO" if tl.carsCanGo else "STOP"
    tl.delay()
    tl = tl.next_state()

(Unfortunately, imputil has been dropped in Python 3.)