Can I ask a possibly silly question? As I understand it, doctest takes a small snippet of code, runs it, and compares the resulting string with a string in the document. This thread seems to be centered around making comparisons of results with indeterminate ordering (dicts being the prime example) work properly. In fact, one proposal was to have doctest call sorted on the output to make sure it's right, which was shot down because that's not always the correct thing to do. So the question is - why isn't dealing with this the responsibility of the test writer? Yeah, it's not quite the spirit of documentation to turn a dictionary into a sorted list in the output, but neither is littering the documentation with +LITERAL_EVAL and the like. <mike -- Mike Meyer <mwm@mired.org> http://www.mired.org/ Independent Software developer/SCM consultant, email for more information. O< ascii ribbon campaign - stop html mail - www.asciiribbon.org