I was recently working on a command line PHP tool, and didn’t have easy access to our normal PHP unit testing framework built around SimpleTest. After a few lines of non-test-driven-development, I started to freak out a bit - I guess I’ve fallen for the view that if code doesn’t have tests, it’s broken.
I didn’t need support for mock objects or complicated assertions - just a bare basic assertTrue() would do the trick. So, I present “pTest”, in 9 lines of code:
/**
* pTest - PHP Unit Tester
* @param mixed $test Condition to test, evaluated as boolean
* @param string $message Descriptive message to output upon test
*/
function assertTrue($test, $message)
{
static $count;
if (!isset($count)) $count = array('pass'=>0, 'fail'=>0, 'total'=>0);
$mode = $test ? 'pass' : 'fail';
printf("%s: %s (%d of %d tests run so far have %sed)\n",
strtoupper($mode), $message, ++$count[$mode], ++$count['total'], $mode);
}
Here’s a few contrived test cases to demonstrate:
assertTrue(1 + 1 == 2, 'one plus one should equal two');
assertTrue(false, 'false should be true (this one will fail)');
assertTrue(!false, 'false should be false');
And the sample output:
PASS: one plus one should equal two (1 of 1 tests run so far have passed)
FAIL: false should be true (this one will fail) (1 of 2 tests run so far have failed)
PASS: false should be false (2 of 3 tests run so far have passed)
If you’re viewing the output in a web browser, you could easily wrap each output message in a <p> tag. Or if you’re using a non-broken browser you could serve the response with header('Content-Type: text/plain');.
Obviously this isn’t to be taken too seriously. Then again, I found it extremely useful to drop into the few command line scripts I was working on.
Another use I can see for such a simple testing function is introducing the uninitiated into the world of unit testing. I know that before I got into it, the biggest barrier was the complexity of the frameworks. Perhaps pTest will give beginners a starting point, from which they can move onto more feature-rich frameworks like PHPUnit or SimpleTest once they outgrow the humble assertTrue().
August 13th, 2007 at 1:47 pm
Interestingly, PHP actually has an assertion tester built-in:
http://php.net/assert
August 13th, 2007 at 2:02 pm
Good point.. although configuring it to result in output similar to assertTrue() (without making any assumptions about PHP’s global configuration) probably uses more lines of code ;)
With a bit of work it can certainly be set up nicely - with added benefits like line number reporting, and output of the evaled assertion code.
But I think the simplicity and self contained nature of pTest probably makes it less daunting to beginners to PHP and unit testing.
August 13th, 2007 at 4:04 pm
Yeah… reckon it must be one of PHP’s least used builtins.
August 13th, 2007 at 5:23 pm
Good lord, people write whole units for this stuff? You know, after three decades of doing this ****, I am still amazed people ever need to waste time on this level of internal reporting.
Unit tester - took me a while just to figure out you meant result tracking… is that the new name for a four decade old method of code auditing?
August 14th, 2007 at 4:11 am
You might want to check out TAP, the Test Anything Protocol:
http://testanything.org/
If you’re going to write a simple library like this, making it TAP-compliant means your output is going to be consumable by a number of mature testing tools.
There’s a PHP library that comes bundled with Apache-Test that outputs TAP and is almost as simple as yours:
http://shiflett.org/code/test-more.php
August 14th, 2007 at 10:15 am
I wrote a small unit tester as part of a forum discussion a while back that I called TinyTest. Although it is 50 lines, not 9, it provides assertTrue(), assertFalse(), pass() and fail() plus standard green/red output of the results. The original ideas was to have a unit tester small enough that you could supply it with posted code and tests.