How do you generate dynamic (parameterized) unit tests in python?

Question

I have some kind of test data and want to create a unit test for each item. My first idea was to do it like this:

import unittest

l = [[\"foo\", \"a\", \"a\         


        

Answer 1

Using unittest (since 3.4)

Since Python 3.4, the standard library unittest package has the subTest context manager.

See the documentation:

• 26.4.7. Distinguishing test iterations using subtests
• subTest

Example:

from unittest import TestCase

param_list = [('a', 'a'), ('a', 'b'), ('b', 'b')]

class TestDemonstrateSubtest(TestCase):
    def test_works_as_expected(self):
        for p1, p2 in param_list:
            with self.subTest():
                self.assertEqual(p1, p2)

You can also specify a custom message and parameter values to subTest():

with self.subTest(msg="Checking if p1 equals p2", p1=p1, p2=p2):

Using nose

The nose testing framework supports this.

Example (the code below is the entire contents of the file containing the test):

param_list = [('a', 'a'), ('a', 'b'), ('b', 'b')]

def test_generator():
    for params in param_list:
        yield check_em, params[0], params[1]

def check_em(a, b):
    assert a == b

The output of the nosetests command:

> nosetests -v
testgen.test_generator('a', 'a') ... ok
testgen.test_generator('a', 'b') ... FAIL
testgen.test_generator('b', 'b') ... ok

======================================================================
FAIL: testgen.test_generator('a', 'b')
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/nose-0.10.1-py2.5.egg/nose/case.py", line 203, in runTest
    self.test(*self.arg)
  File "testgen.py", line 7, in check_em
    assert a == b
AssertionError

----------------------------------------------------------------------
Ran 3 tests in 0.006s

FAILED (failures=1)