Question

I have a sample doctest like this one.

"""
This is the "iniFileGenerator" module.
>>> hintFile = "./tests/unit_test_files/hint.txt"
>>> f = iniFileGenerator(hintFile)
>>> print f.hintFilePath
./tests/unit_test_files/hint.txt
"""
class iniFileGenerator:
    def __init__(self, hintFilePath):
        self.hintFilePath = hintFilePath
    def hello(self):
        """
        >>> f.hello()
        hello
        """
        print "hello"
if __name__ == "__main__":
    import doctest
    doctest.testmod()

When I execute this code, I got this error.

Failed example:
    f.hello()
Exception raised:
    Traceback (most recent call last):
      File "/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/doctest.py", line 1254, in __run
        compileflags, 1) in test.globs
      File "<doctest __main__.iniFileGenerator.hello[0]>", line 1, in <module>
        f.hello()
    NameError: name 'f' is not defined

This error is caused by accessing ‘f’ which was not accessible when testing hello() method.

Is there any way to share the object which is created before? Without it, one need to create object all the time when it’s necessary.

def hello(self):
    """
    hintFile = "./tests/unit_test_files/hint.txt"
    >>> f = iniFileGenerator(hintFile)
    >>> f.hello()
    hello
    """
    print "hello"

Answer 1

You can use testmod(extraglobs={'f': initFileGenerator('')}) to define a reusable object globally.

As the doctest doc says,

extraglobs gives a dict merged into the globals used to execute examples. This works like dict.update()

But I used to test all methods in __doc__ of class before all methods.

class MyClass(object):
    """MyClass
    >>> m = MyClass()
    >>> m.hello()
    hello
    >>> m.world()
    world
    """

    def hello(self):
        """method hello"""
        print 'hello'

    def world(self):
        """method world"""
        print 'world'