Book Image

pytest Quick Start Guide

By : Bruno Oliveira
Book Image

pytest Quick Start Guide

By: Bruno Oliveira

Overview of this book

Python's standard unittest module is based on the xUnit family of frameworks, which has its origins in Smalltalk and Java, and tends to be verbose to use and not easily extensible.The pytest framework on the other hand is very simple to get started, but powerful enough to cover complex testing integration scenarios, being considered by many the true Pythonic approach to testing in Python. In this book, you will learn how to get started right away and get the most out of pytest in your daily work?ow, exploring powerful mechanisms and plugins to facilitate many common testing tasks. You will also see how to use pytest in existing unittest-based test suites and will learn some tricks to make the jump to a pytest-style test suite quickly and easily.
Table of Contents (9 chapters)

Parametrization

A common testing activity is passing multiple values to the same test function and asserting the outcome.

Suppose we have an application that allows the user to define custom mathematical formulas, which will be parsed and evaluated at runtime. The formulas are given as strings, and can make use of mathematical functions such as sin, cos, log, and so on. A very simple way to implement this in Python would be to use the eval built-in (https://docs.python.org/3/library/functions.html#eval), but because it can execute arbitrary code, we opt to use a custom tokenizer and evaluator for safety, instead..

Let's not delve into the implementation details but rather focus on a test:

def test_formula_parsing():
tokenizer = FormulaTokenizer()
formula = Formula.from_string("C0 * x + 10", tokenizer)
assert formula.eval(x=1.0, C0=2.0) == pytest.approx...