I'm announcing today a new testsuite application for Markdown called
MDTest. I've been using it as a replacement for John's Markdown Test
for some time now I think it's ready for release.
First, I want to say Markdown Test has been very useful in developing
PHP Markdown. The testsuite covers many cases, however I still found
the need to add other tests for PHP Markdown, to cover bugs specific
to my implementation, or simply to covers areas for which Markdown
Test had no test case. The tests I added cover practically everything
that was changed or fixed in PHP Markdown in the last couple of
years; I expect that to be useful to others.
I've also made a new testsuite dedicated to PHP Markdown Extra, with
tests for all the features. It has been very practical, and worked
very well with Markdown Test, except for one thing.
HTML normalization is the weak point of Markdown Test. Because
different outputs can have the same HTML meaning, Markdown Test has
an option to compare outputs filtered through Tidy. Personally, I
have to say that I find Tidy to be more trouble than it is worth:
because it fixes too much the HTML garbage you send to it, it often
fixes the strange markup a bug in Markdown can generate.
I've made some time ago a modification allowing Markdown Test to
print a diff of the expected output whenever a test failed, and I've
been using it since instead of Tidy because I find it more reliable
to check the differences myself. The only problem with this approach
is that having made a couple of architectural changes to PHP
Markdown, especially in the HTML block parser and in the way it
generates hashes, it often generate whitespace differently around
tags; having changed back the list processing so that it no longer
produce strangely-indented list items and sublists (a workaround no
longer necessary for PHP Markdown), it forces me to check many things
manually every time.
So I decided recently that I'd build a better tool. It's called
MDTest, and it's written in PHP. The idea is that by using PHP I can
leverage PHP 5's HTML parser and normalize whitespace directly from
the DOM tree. This is what it does, and I've found it to be a much
better alternative than Tidy (although not perfect either). MDTest
can also show a short diff for every failed test, which may prove
useful to double check things with normalization off. And because
it's written in PHP, it can call the Markdown function by itself
without the need for an intermediary script. It can still call
Markdown.pl or any other script, like Markdown Test does.
The benchmarking info is a lot more detailed too. It shows the time
it takes to process each test, and compiles a nice summary at the
end. The total parse time excludes the time MDTest is running --
reading files, creating a diff or normalizing the output. MDTest also
point out the average, minimum, first-quartile, median, third-
quartile, and maximum time for running tests, and it provides these
times as a difference with the minimum time too. I think this will
allow some cross-implementation benchmarking by mostly eliminating
overhead time for starting a process when calling a script.
For instance, here are the benchmarks for PHP Markdown on my iBook:
Total Avg. Min. Q1. Med. Q3. Max.
Parse Time (ms): 1356 29 2 4 7 22 554
Diff. Min. (ms): 1237 26 0 1 4 20 551
And with Markdown.pl 1.0.2b8:
Total Avg. Min. Q1. Med. Q3. Max.
Parse Time (ms): 11143 242 177 182 196 225 1696
Diff. Min. (ms): 2986 64 0 5 18 48 1519
This benchmark includes time for processing three testsuites: one is
John Gruber's Markdown testsuite, the one comming with Markdown Test,
the two others are PHP Markdown's and PHP Markdown Extra's own
testsuites.
MDTest works with multiple testsuites (which are simply test folders)
and by default use all the folders it can find in its directory with
the .mdtest extension. Having a separate testsuite for PHP Markdown
is useful in the sense that I don't have to mix my tests with John's
and merge the changes whenever he updates his; it's useful also
because I don't have to wait for an update to John's testsuite to add
my own tests, and because I can put in some extra tests if needed.
Eventually, both could be merged I suppose. PHP Markdown Extra's
testsuite simply covers the features of PHP Markdown Extra.
There is still a little strangeness about some test cases right now:
PHP Markdown fails some tests from John's base Markdown testsuite,
this because John's testsuite is expecting empty title attributes on
images and/or links when no title has been specified (a bug I'd say).
There's an opposite test in the PHP Markdown testsuite checking that
the titles are indeed not present when not specified. I think both
should be harmonised. Also PHP Markdown Extra will fail PHP
Markdown's extensive Emphasis test because Extra doesn't accept
underscore-emphasis in the middle of a word while regular Markdown
does. There's a special test in the Extra testsuite for this emphasis
deviation.
So I'm publishing today MDTest, bundled with John's Markdown Test
testsuite (unchanged) and the two others I have made for PHP Markdown
and PHP Markdown Extra.
In the MDTest folder, you'll find the mdtest.php script, which you
can run on the command line. It works pretty much like Markdown Test,
except it takes one-letter arguments (because of an implementation
detail). The normalization feature requires PHP 5, so Mac OS X's
default PHP install won't work for that, unfortunately. Here's the
help page:
MDTest Usage
============
./mdtest.php [-dnvh] [-l library_path [-f function]] [-t test_dir]*
./mdtest.php [-dnvh] [-s script_path] [-t test_dir]*
Options | Description
------- | -----------
-n | normalize HTML output before compare
-d | show a diff of output vs. expected output
-l library | PHP library to load (like markdown.php)
-f function | PHP function to call (Markdown)
-s script | script to execute (like Markdown.pl)
-t test_dir | testsuite directory to use
-v | display MDTest version
-h | show this help
There's also a handy index.php file which provides a simple web
interface to the script. What's particularly nice is that it takes
all the files in the Implementation subfolder and creates a menu to
select what script, or PHP library, to test.
You can download it here (167 Kb):
<http://www.michelf.com/docs/projets/mdtest-1.0.zip>
(MDTest is available under the GNU General Public License.)
Michel Fortin
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.michelf.com/
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