Adapter pattern

This article may contain excessive or irrelevant examples. Please help improve the article by adding descriptive text and removing less pertinent examples. (January 2011)

In software engineering, the adapter pattern is a software design pattern (also known as wrapper, an alternative naming shared with the decorator pattern) that allows the interface of an existing class to be used as another interface.^[1] It is often used to make existing classes work with others without modifying their source code.

An example is an adapter that converts the interface of a Document Object Model of an XML document into a tree structure that can be displayed.