Pattern matching is a powerful tool for symbolic computations. Applications
include term rewriting systems, as well as the manipulation of symbolic
expressions, abstract syntax trees, and XML and JSON data. It also allows for
an intuitive description of algorithms in the form of rewrite rules. We present
the open source Python module MatchPy, which offers functionality and
expressiveness similar to the pattern matching in Mathematica. In particular,
it includes syntactic pattern matching, as well as matching for commutative
and/or associative functions, sequence variables, and matching with
constraints. MatchPy uses new and improved algorithms to efficiently find
matches for large pattern sets by exploiting similarities between patterns. The
performance of MatchPy is investigated on several real-world problems