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

As of Python 3.4 subtests have been introduced to unittest for this purpose. See the documentation for details. TestCase.subTest is a context manager which allows one to isolate asserts in a test so that a failure will be reported with parameter information but does not stop the test execution. Here's the example from the documentation:

class NumbersTest(unittest.TestCase):

def test_even(self):
    """
    Test that numbers between 0 and 5 are all even.
    """
    for i in range(0, 6):
        with self.subTest(i=i):
            self.assertEqual(i % 2, 0)

The output of a test run would be:

======================================================================
FAIL: test_even (__main__.NumbersTest) (i=1)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "subtests.py", line 32, in test_even
    self.assertEqual(i % 2, 0)
AssertionError: 1 != 0

======================================================================
FAIL: test_even (__main__.NumbersTest) (i=3)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "subtests.py", line 32, in test_even
    self.assertEqual(i % 2, 0)
AssertionError: 1 != 0

======================================================================
FAIL: test_even (__main__.NumbersTest) (i=5)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "subtests.py", line 32, in test_even
    self.assertEqual(i % 2, 0)
AssertionError: 1 != 0

This is also part of unittest2, so it is available for earlier versions of Python.