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

In order to do this:

disrespect_privacy @object do |p|
  assert p.private_method
end

You can implement this in your test_helper file:

class ActiveSupport::TestCase
  def disrespect_privacy(object_or_class, &block)   # access private methods in a block
    raise ArgumentError, 'Block must be specified' unless block_given?
    yield Disrespect.new(object_or_class)
  end

  class Disrespect
    def initialize(object_or_class)
      @object = object_or_class
    end
    def method_missing(method, *args)
      @object.send(method, *args)
    end
  end
end