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SOLID is a set of object oriented design principles aimed at making code more maintainable and flexible. They were coined by Robert "Uncle Bob" Martin in the year 2000 in his paper Design Principles and Design Patterns. The SOLID principles apply to any object oriented language, but I'm going to concentrate on what they mean in a Python application in this post.

I originally wrote about SOLID principles with PHP as the basis of the article, but as the lessons here can be easily applied to any object oriented language I thought that I would re-write it with Python in mind. If you are familiar with only PHP or Python then this will be a good learning resource on learning the other side.

I was looking at some malfunctioning code the other day where the price was pulled out of one API service and sent to another API. The problem stemmed from the fact that the value coming out of the first API was as a string and the second API required the price in pence as an integer.

The difference in formats here meant that the number had to be converted from one format to another. During this process it was found that the value was sometimes out by a single pence.

For example, whilst the first API sent over a value of £20.40, the second API received a value of 2039, which is one penny out. This class did have some unit tests, but the tests but had failed to account for this rounding error.

As it turned out, this wasn't the only problem with the class in question, so I thought I would write up a quick PHP:CSI showing the problems and how I solved them.

If you create classes in PHP then you should be unit testing them as much as you can. Setting up unit testing classes for your code can be time consuming and involve a bunch of copying and pasting. Thankfully, PHPUnit comes with a couple of helper functions that allow the creation of unit testing classes automatically, which can save a bit of copying and pasting.

As an example for this post I will use the following Spider class, which is part of some code I am working on at the moment to create a simple site spider in PHP.