Question

I have a folder ‘pyMS’ that contains scripts with doctests. Also in pyMS is a folder ‘test’ which has both unit tests and a folder ‘testfiles’ that contains files with data that I use for testing.

pyMS/
├── __init__.py
├── baseFunctions.py
└── test
    ├── __init__.py
    ├── test_baseFunctions.py
    └── testfiles
        └── testfile.txt

I want to use the unittest to run the doctest with

suite.addTest(doctest.DocTestSuite("baseFunctions") 

However, I’m running in the problem when I try to use files in the doctest.

This would work when doing the doctest from the commandline (python baseFunctions -v):

testfile = open('test/testfiles/testfile.txt')

but when running it from the unittest it gives an IOError because the test_baseFunctions.py is in the test folder, so the correct location for the file is /testfiles/testfile.txt instead of test/testfiles/testfile.txt.

My very ugly solution now is

import os
testfile = open(os.abspath('').split('pyMS')[0]+'pyMS'+os.sep+'test'+os.sep+'testfiles'+os.sep+'testfile.txt'

What would be a better way to handle this?

Answer 1

You can standardize by doing an os.chdir() to the appropriate place. For running tests, I can’t think of any reason not to.