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<title>5.3.1 Basic example
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<H2><A NAME=
"SECTION007310000000000000000"></A><A NAME=
"minimal-example"></A>
The
<tt class=
"module">unittest
</tt> module provides a rich set of tools for
constructing and running tests. This section demonstrates that a
small subset of the tools suffice to meet the needs of most users.
Here is a short script to test three functions from the
<tt class=
"module"><a href=
"module-random.html">random
</a></tt> module:
<div class=
"verbatim"><pre>
class TestSequenceFunctions(unittest.TestCase):
# make sure the shuffled sequence does not lose any elements
self.assertEqual(self.seq, range(
10))
element = random.choice(self.seq)
self.assert_(element in self.seq)
self.assertRaises(ValueError, random.sample, self.seq,
20)
for element in random.sample(self.seq,
5):
self.assert_(element in self.seq)
if __name__ == '__main__':
A testcase is created by subclassing
<tt class=
"class">unittest.TestCase
</tt>.
The three individual tests are defined with methods whose names start with
the letters
"<tt class="samp
">test</tt>". This naming convention informs the test runner
about which methods represent tests.
The crux of each test is a call to
<tt class=
"method">assertEqual()
</tt> to
check for an expected result;
<tt class=
"method">assert_()
</tt> to verify a condition;
or
<tt class=
"method">assertRaises()
</tt> to verify that an expected exception gets
raised. These methods are used instead of the
<tt class=
"keyword">assert
</tt> statement
so the test runner can accumulate all test results and produce a report.
When a
<tt class=
"method">setUp()
</tt> method is defined, the test runner will run that
method prior to each test. Likewise, if a
<tt class=
"method">tearDown()
</tt> method is
defined, the test runner will invoke that method after each test. In the
example,
<tt class=
"method">setUp()
</tt> was used to create a fresh sequence for each test.
The final block shows a simple way to run the tests.
<tt class=
"function">unittest.main()
</tt> provides a command line interface to the
test script. When run from the command line, the above script
produces an output that looks like this:
<div class=
"verbatim"><pre>
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Instead of
<tt class=
"function">unittest.main()
</tt>, there are other ways to run the tests
with a finer level of control, less terse output, and no requirement to be
run from the command line. For example, the last two lines may be replaced
<div class=
"verbatim"><pre>
suite = unittest.makeSuite(TestSequenceFunctions)
unittest.TextTestRunner(verbosity=
2).run(suite)
Running the revised script from the interpreter or another script
produces the following output:
<div class=
"verbatim"><pre>
testchoice (__main__.TestSequenceFunctions) ... ok
testsample (__main__.TestSequenceFunctions) ... ok
testshuffle (__main__.TestSequenceFunctions) ... ok
----------------------------------------------------------------------
The above examples show the most commonly used
<tt class=
"module">unittest
</tt> features
which are sufficient to meet many everyday testing needs. The remainder
of the documentation explores the full feature set from first principles.
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<span class=
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2.4.2, documentation updated on
28 September
2005.
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