[TIP] doctests with either-or outcome

[Tarek Ziadé]

On Sat, Sep 27, 2008 at 2:37 PM, Michael Foord <fuzzyman at voidspace.org.uk>wrote:

> Pete Forman wrote:
> > "Rob Kirkpatrick" <robert.d.kirkpatrick at gmail.com> writes:
> >
> >  > Is there a way of having a doctest pass if it has EITHER output A
> >  > or output B?
> >
> > What about this approach?
> >
> >
> >>>> output = get_output()
> >>>> output in (output_A, output_B)
> >>>>
> > True
> >
> >
> In my opinion this is one of the problems with the doctest approach.
> Should this fail you get a 'False != True' message that doesn't show you
> what the actual output was.



But in the first place like Pete said, why the output differs ? why testing
the output of the command ?
This is not a good test to do.

I would rather test what should be the final state of the ressource, not the
output of the command
that builds it. A bit like a smoke test:

  >>> i_dont_care = get_output()
  >>> check_resource_is_present()
  True


-- 
Tarek Ziadé | Association AfPy | www.afpy.org
Blog FR | http://programmation-python.org
Blog EN | http://tarekziade.wordpress.com/
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