Ben Finney wrote:
Howdy Michael,
I'm interested in the changes you're proposing for Python's 'unittest'
module. I am (like, I suspect, many Python coders) maintaining my own
set of extensions to the module across many projects, so I'd really
like to see many of the improvements you discuss actually in the
standard library.
What assistance can I offer to help on this issue?
I intend to start working on them in August, after I have finished my
current writing commitments.
The full list of changes proposed (feel free to start - but ping me or
the list) and not shot down was something like:
Documenting that the assert method names are to be preferred over the
'FailUnless' names (this stirred up some controversy this weekend so should
probably not happen).
Adding the following new asserts:
assertIn (member, container, msg=None)
assertNotIn (member, container, msg=None)
assertIs (first, second, msg=None)
assertNotIs (first, second, msg=None)
assertRaisesWithMessage (exc_class, message, callable, *args,
**keywargs)
A simple 'RunTests' function that takes a collection of modules, test
suites or test cases and runs them with TextTestRunner - passing on
keyword arguments to the test runner. This makes running a test suite
easier - once you have collected all your test cases together you can
just pass them to this function so long as you are happy with the
default runner (possibly allowing an alternative runner class to be
provided as a keyword argument).
Make the error messages for "assertEquals" and
"assertNotEquals" more useful - showing the objects that compare
incorrectly even if an explicit message is passed in. Additionally, when
comparing lists and tuples that are the same length show the members
(and indices?) that were different.
Possibly even providing a diff in the case of comparing strings (we have an
implementation of this at work).
assertLessThan
assertGreaterThan
assertLessThanOrEquals
assertGreaterThanOrEquals
Guido suggested various variants on assertEquals:
assertListEqual(self, list1, list2, msg=None):
assertDictEqual(self, d1, d2, msg=None):
assertMultiLineEqual(self, first, second, msg=Non
In my opinion these can all be provided by improving the messages from
assertEquals and don't require new methods.
assertSameElements(self, expected_seq, actual_seq, msg=None):
I usually achieve this with:
assertEquals(set(actual), set(expected))
A convenience method might be nice, but I'm worried about the API growing in an
unbounded way.
Other suggestions that weren't controversial but I might not get to:
assertRaisesWithMessage taking a regex to match the error message
expect methods that collect failures and report at the end of the test
(allowing an individual test method to raise several errors without stopping)
assertIsInstance and assertIsSubclass
Michael Foord
--
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