How to assert output with nosetest/unittest in python?

Question

I\'m writing tests for a function like next one:

def foo():
    print \'hello world!\'

So when I want to test this function the code will b

Answer 1

Both n611x007 and Noumenon already suggested using unittest.mock, but this answer adapts Acumenus's to show how you can easily wrap unittest.TestCase methods to interact with a mocked stdout.

import io
import unittest
import unittest.mock

msg = "Hello World!"


# function we will be testing
def foo():
    print(msg, end="")


# create a decorator which wraps a TestCase method and pass it a mocked
# stdout object
mock_stdout = unittest.mock.patch('sys.stdout', new_callable=io.StringIO)


class MyTests(unittest.TestCase):

    @mock_stdout
    def test_foo(self, stdout):
        # run the function whose output we want to test
        foo()
        # get its output from the mocked stdout
        actual = stdout.getvalue()
        expected = msg
        self.assertEqual(actual, expected)