Howdy Monks,

I've got a web scraping script. It works fine, except it's a PITA to test the program logic, because the conditions under which it scrapes an external web site only happen for about an hour a day (the information being scraped is time sensitive).

In order for me to test the script's logic outside of that one hour a day, I have to fake:

I currently accomplish this by setting a "TEST" flag in my code, and at certain junctures testing for it and running different code if I'm testing. Then there's also some bits of code that I just comment/uncomment during tests. I'd like to rewrite the package that contains my obj/methods so that when the object is created as a "test", the usual methods will not scrape the external site, query the DB, etc normally. Instead they'll execute under testing conditions, so that I can test program logic during other times of the day.

Any thoughts on how, generally, to think about writing code to handle this kind of thing?

Thanks in advance,

AH

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In reply to web scraper testing by alienhuman

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