Comments on: pTest: PHP Unit Tester in 9 Lines Of Code

By: Christopher Thompson

Christopher Thompson — Tue, 14 Aug 2007 00:15:49 +0000

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.


class UnitTester {
        var $_passes = 0;
        var $_fails = 0;
        var $_test_stack = array();
        var $_trace_pos = 0;
        var $output = '';
       
        function assertTrue($result, $pos=0) {
                if ($result) {
                        $this->pass();
                } else {
                        $this->_trace_pos = $pos + 1;
                        $this->fail();
                }
        }

        function assertFalse($result, $pos=0) {
                if ($result) {
                        $this->_trace_pos = $pos + 1;
                        $this->fail();
                } else {
                        $this->pass();
                }
        }

        function pass() {
                ++$this->_passes;
        }

        function fail() {
                ++$this->_fails;
                $test_data = debug_backtrace();
                $this->_test_stack[] = $test_data[$this->_trace_pos];
                $this->_trace_pos = 0;
        }

        var $passed_heading_style = 'color: white; background-color: green; margin-top: 2; padding: 4 4 4 4;';
        var $failed_heading_style = 'color: white; background-color: red; margin-top: 2; padding: 4 4 4 4;';
        var $failed_test_style = 'color: white; background-color: red; margin-top: 2; padding-left: 4;';

        function __destruct() {
                if ($this->_fails > 0) {
                        $output = '<div style="' . $this->failed_heading_style . '">Failed ' . $this->_fails . ' of ' . ($this->_fails + $this->_passes) . ' tests. </div>';
                        $n = 1;
                        foreach ($this->_test_stack as $this_data) {
                                $message = $n++ . ". Failed: {$this_data['function']} on line {$this_data['line']} of file {$this_data['file']}. ";
                                $output .= '<div style="' . $this->failed_test_style . '">' . $message . '</div>';
                        }
                } else {
                        $output = '<div style="' . $this->passed_heading_style . '">Passed ' .$this->_passes . ' tests.</div>';
                }
            echo $output;
        }

}

By: shiflett

shiflett — Mon, 13 Aug 2007 18:11:05 +0000

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

By: deathshadow

deathshadow — Mon, 13 Aug 2007 07:23:19 +0000

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?

By: z0s0

z0s0 — Mon, 13 Aug 2007 06:04:39 +0000

Yeah… reckon it must be one of PHP’s least used builtins.

By: Paul Annesley

Paul Annesley — Mon, 13 Aug 2007 04:02:07 +0000

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.

By: z0s0

z0s0 — Mon, 13 Aug 2007 03:47:31 +0000

Interestingly, PHP actually has an assertion tester built-in:

http://php.net/assert