What's the best way to unit test protected & private methods in Ruby?

Question

What\'s the best way to unit test protected and private methods in Ruby, using the standard Ruby Test::Unit framework?

I\'m sure somebody will pipe up a

Answer 1

You can "reopen" the class and provide a new method that delegates to the private one:

class Foo
  private
  def bar; puts "Oi! how did you reach me??"; end
end
# and then
class Foo
  def ah_hah; bar; end
end
# then
Foo.new.ah_hah