Question

I am about to write junit tests for a XML parsing Java class that outputs directly to an OutputStream. For example xmlWriter.writeString('foo'); would produce something like <aTag>foo</aTag> to be written to the outputstream held inside the XmlWriter instance. The question is how to test this behaviour. One solution would of course be to let the OutputStream be a FileOutputStream and then read the results by opening the written file, but it isn’t very elegant.

Answer 1

Use a ByteArrayOutputStream and then get the data out of that using toByteArray(). This won’t test how it writes to the stream (one byte at a time or as a big buffer) but usually you shouldn’t care about that anyway.