Book Image

The Python Apprentice

By : Robert Smallshire, Austin Bingham
Book Image

The Python Apprentice

By: Robert Smallshire, Austin Bingham

Overview of this book

Experienced programmers want to know how to enhance their craft and we want to help them start as apprentices with Python. We know that before mastering Python you need to learn the culture and the tools to become a productive member of any Python project. Our goal with this book is to give you a practical and thorough introduction to Python programming, providing you with the insight and technical craftsmanship you need to be a productive member of any Python project. Python is a big language, and it’s not our intention with this book to cover everything there is to know. We just want to make sure that you, as the developer, know the tools, basic idioms and of course the ins and outs of the language, the standard library and other modules to be able to jump into most projects.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Authors
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface
12
Afterword – Just the Beginning

Using fixtures to create temporary files


The next thing want to do is be able to pass a filename to analyze_text() so that it knows what to process. Of course, for analyze_text() to work this filename should refer to a file that actually exists! To make sure that a file exists for our tests, we're going to define some fixtures.

The first fixture we can define is the method TestCase.setUp(). If defined, this method is run before each test method in the TestCase. In this case, we'll use setUp() to create a file for us and remember the filename as a member of the TestCase:

# text_analyzer.py

class TextAnalysisTests(unittest.TestCase):
    . . .
    def setUp(self):
        "Fixture that creates a file for the text methods to use."
        self.filename = 'text_analysis_test_file.txt'
        with open(self.filename, 'w') as f:
            f.write('Now we are engaged in a great civil war,\n'
                    'testing whether that nation,\n'
                    'or any nation so conceived and...