[New-bugs-announce] [issue29686] Unittest - Return empty string instead of None object on shortDescription()

Vinícius Dantas report at bugs.python.org
Wed Mar 1 11:21:40 EST 2017


New submission from Vinícius Dantas:

I have been browsing around the unittest standard library, and I realized that TestCase's shortDescription() method at lib/pythonX.X/unittest/case.py returns None when the there is no docstring on the test that is running.
As shortDescription() should obviously return a string, I would recommend returning an empty string instead of None when no docstring is found.
This came to mind when I was using testscenario package, which only displays the scenarioname when shortDescription() returns something but None.
When we are starting from scratch a test suite, docstrings are left for another stage, when we have running (probably failed, if we are TDDing) unittests.
Last yet not least, I am sure it's a good practice to avoid returning None, which forces None-checks, returning empty strings, lists, objects of the return type expected from that function.

----------
components: Tests
messages: 288763
nosy: viniciusd
priority: normal
severity: normal
status: open
title: Unittest - Return empty string instead of None object on shortDescription()
type: behavior
versions: Python 3.5

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Python tracker <report at bugs.python.org>
<http://bugs.python.org/issue29686>
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