Re: RFC: Test::Cases -- Worth releasing?

I like to keep my input and output in two seperate files, say test1.test and test1.ok. My test scripts put their output into test1.test, and I use cmp from a shell script to compare the test output to the correct output.

What's nice about this is if my test fails, I can run diff test1.{test,ok} to see what changed that made it fail, or a whole variety of other shell or perl tools designed for showing the differences between files. And if I find that the new test output is good, I can just type cp test1.{test,ok} to make it the new correct output.

Comment on Re: RFC: Test::Cases -- Worth releasing?

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Re^2: RFC: Test::Cases -- Worth releasing? by xdg (Monsignor) on Sep 16, 2005 at 16:39 UTC
That's an interesting approach. I've tried similar things at times but usually found that maintaining the separate files meant more work keeping my inputs and outputs in sync -- but I could see that approach being better if the files themselves are particularly long. As for `diff`, I actually use Test::Differences instead of Test::More's `is()` (but only if it's available so end users won't need Test::Differences as a dependency) to give me that kind of comparison, but I could see that direct access to `diff` would make some complex cases easier to figure out. (I wish I could get unified context diffs from Test::Differences.) -xdg Code written by xdg and posted on PerlMonks is public domain. It is provided as is with no warranties, express or implied, of any kind. Posted code may not have been tested. Use of posted code is at your own risk.	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re^3: RFC: Test::Cases -- Worth releasing? by sgifford (Prior) on Sep 16, 2005 at 16:49 UTC
Yeah, I tend to use this for test that have a few hundred lines of output, which are useful for testing the final results of a system. For example, I often generate complete HTML pages to make sure everything in a Web application has worked properly. One trick that's nice is if I know what's changed, I can see if there are any differences besides that with some shell cleverness. For example, if I've added an output field called `some_thing` to my test file, and the only thing that should have changed is the addition of that one field, I can run something like: `diff -u <(grep -v some_thing test1.test) test1.ok` [download]	[reply] [d/l]