Avoid converting functions to methods in a class

Chris Colbert sccolbert at gmail.com
Fri Feb 19 23:18:12 EST 2010


this is somewhat hackish:

In [1]: def test():
   ...:     print 'spam'
   ...:
   ...:

In [20]: class Ham():
   ....:     target = {'target': test}
   ....:     def test_eggs(self):
   ....:         self.target['target']()
   ....:
   ....:

In [21]: h = Ham()

In [22]: h.test_eggs()
spam


On Fri, Feb 19, 2010 at 10:33 PM, Steven D'Aprano <
steve at remove-this-cybersource.com.au> wrote:

> I have a convention when writing unit tests to put the target of the test
> into a class attribute, as follows:
>
> class MyTest(unittest.TestCase):
>    target = mymodule.someclass
>
>    def test_spam(self):
>        """Test that someclass has a spam attribute."""
>        self.failUnless(hasattr(self.target, 'spam'))
>
>
> It works well until I write a test for stand-alone functions:
>
> class AnotherTest(unittest.TestCase):
>    target = mymodule.function
>
>    def test_foo(self):
>        self.assertEquals(self.target('a', 'b'), 'foo')
>
> The problem is that target is turned into a method of my test class, not
> a standalone function, and I get errors like:
>
> TypeError: function() takes exactly 2 arguments (3 given)
>
> The solution I currently use is to drop the target attribute in this
> class, and just refer to mymodule.function in each individual test. I
> don't like this solution because it violates Once And Only Once: if the
> function changes name, I have to make many edits to the test suite rather
> than just one.
>
> Are there any better solutions?
>
>
> --
> Steven
> --
> http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
>
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