Comment #3 on issue 375 by bryan.oakley: New space separated plain text
test data format
http://code.google.com/p/robotframework/issues/detail?id=375
Have you ever considered requiring explicit delimiters around parameters
instead of
using whitespace? I know it can lead to quoting hell in degenerate cases,
but I like
how it makes data stand out for normal cases.
Of course, that means one has to escape quotes in an argument and there
might have to
be some rule to separate test names and keywords. I could be totally wrong
here, but
I think the normal case wouldn't require much escaping and make writing and
reading
tests much easier, at the expense of making a few degenerate cases more
difficult.
Let's look at a real world example. Say I have a library function that
fetches a list
of hotels by zipcode and star rating (eg: "4 stars"). With the
multiple-whitespace
proposal it might look like:
GetHotelInZipWithStars 60010 4
That's arguably not very readable. However, if the rule is "all text in
quotes are
parameters, and everything else is combined to create a function name" the
test could
look like this:
Get hotel in zip "60010" with "4" stars
This would also let me write assertions in a more readable style, such as:
Assert that "5" hotels were returned
Personally I would find that more preferable, though I haven't thought
about it
deeply enough to know if it's truly better or merely different.
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