On Thu, Dec 7, 2017 at 12:56 AM, Michael Orlitzky <mich...@orlitzky.com> wrote:
> On 12/06/2017 09:49 AM, Erik Bray wrote:
>>
>> Did anyone ever think up a better solution to this?
>>
>
> Whatever you do, you wind up with a big pile of dict output in the
> middle of your test case. So (where possible) you might as well use that
> space to define a new dict containing the expected value. For example,
>
> >>> actual = some_computation()
> >>> expected = { 1: "one",
> ... 2: "two",
> ... 9: "nine" }
> >>> actual == expected
> True
>
> That's harder to do when the dict is buried in some other data
> structure, but maybe we shouldn't be testing the exact string
> representation of some big conglomerate in the first place -- do we
> actually care what it is? Instead, we should test only what we care about.
>
> Regardless, I don't think the framework should make it look like you can
> rely on dicts being sorted when you can't. Users should be able to run
> the EXAMPLES and see what we say they'll see.
That is a good thing and a bad thing about so many of the tests
doubling as "examples" in the documentation (especially for 'public'
methods to the extent that there is such a thing). You want them to
actually function nicely as examples of how a user should use an
interface and what a user should expect to see. Going into
contortions in order to make it function reliably as a test can be at
odds with that.
If we're talking one dict it's not much of a problem. The main
problem seems to be with more complex objects that contain dicts
nested in their reprs. And you do sometimes want to test the repr
string itself too (that, however, could be in the form of a TEST not
an EXAMPLE).
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