Question

I’ve got a Python program that reads from sys.stdin, so I can call it with ./foo.py < bar.png. How do I test this code from within another Python module? That is, how do I set stdin to point to the contents of a file while running the test script? I don’t want to do something like ./test.py < test.png. I don’t think I can use fileinput, because the input is binary, and I only want to handle a single file. The file is opened using Image.open(sys.stdin) from PIL.

Answer 1

You should generalise your script so that it can be invoked from the test script, in addition to being used as a standalone program. Here’s an example script that does this:

#! /usr/bin/python

import sys

def read_input_from(file):
    print file.read(),

if __name__ == "__main__":
    if len(sys.argv) > 1:
        # filename supplied, so read input from that
        filename = sys.argv[1]
        file = open(filename)
    else:
        # no filename supplied, so read from stdin
        file = sys.stdin
    read_input_from(file)

If this is called with a filename, the contents of that file will be displayed. Otherwise, input read from stdin will be displayed. (Being able to pass a filename on the command line might be a useful improvement for your foo.py script.)

In the test script you can now invoke the function in foo.py with a file, for example:

#! /usr/bin/python

import foo

file = open("testfile", "rb")
foo.read_input_from(file)