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

Here is a general addition to Class which I use. It's a bit more shotgun than only making public the method you are testing, but in most cases it doesn't matter, and it's much more readable.

class Class
  def publicize_methods
    saved_private_instance_methods = self.private_instance_methods
    self.class_eval { public *saved_private_instance_methods }
    begin
      yield
    ensure
      self.class_eval { private *saved_private_instance_methods }
    end
  end
end

MyClass.publicize_methods do
  assert_equal 10, MyClass.new.secret_private_method
end

Using send to access protected/private methods is broken in 1.9, so is not a recommended solution.