[TIP] Unittesting command line scripts with unittest2?

[Michael Foord]

On 28/07/2010 21:59, Jorge Vargas wrote:
> I started writing some tests using this skeleton.
>
> http://paste.ofcode.org/wr4JtC36nsMEWUVYPdSqj2
>
> That is doing two things
>
> 1- silencing the print statements as well as the subprocess calls
> 2- giving me a variable to test the output.
>
>    
I'm afraid I don't understand what you are wanting to do. Is main() in 
that code unittest2.main() ?

I don't think that replacing sys.stdout will silence the output of 
subprocesses. The subprocess module itself has ways of collecting output 
though.
> So I have two questions, is this a good approach? is there a better
> way? perhaps it should be abstracted into a separate module, maybe a
> unittest2 plugin?
>
> Also Today I realized there is something wrong with this approach. I'm
> messing around with sys.argv which when called as `unit2 discover`
> gives some troubles. In fact after upgrading to the plugins branch of
> unittest2 I realized my tests are broken as sys.argv[1] will give an
> error. I assume this is a side effect for getopt which was removed in
> http://hg.python.org/unittest2/rev/0190b218cf49 therefore this is a
> minor incompatibility between unittest2-0.5.1 and tip.
>    

sys.argv will contain whatever the *original* test runner script was 
called with. None of the unittest2 code modifies sys.argv and I don't 
think that has changed since I stopped using getopt. If your tests 
depend on the contents of sys.argv you can set or modify the list. (At 
least I'm pretty sure I don't mutate sys.argv - I would consider that 
bad practise, feel free to point it out if I am but a cursory glance 
doesn't show anything.)

There is a difference in the plugins branch: calling unit2 on its own 
(no args) will launch test discovery (equivalent of `unit2 discover`), 
in this case there will be no sys.argv[1]. Could this be what has happened?

All the best,

Michael Foord

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