From: Florian Gross <flgr@...>
Date: 2004-05-29T20:38:39+09:00
Subject: Re: Test::Unit: assert_follows_spec() (or something like that)

Jean-Hugues ROBERT wrote:

> Hi

Moin.


> About the generation of HTML documentation, I feel, again, that the
> full spec is not easy to grab. I would rather like to see some RDoc
> tool that would consider test cases as "examples".

I'm currently embedding test cases into the documentation. They look a
lot like example code. I think this is commonly called "Specification by
example". I've written a tool for automatically extracting and running
them. Here is an example:

     # Matches the space between words.
     # This is a zero-width anchor.
     #
     #   re = Regexp::English.word_boundary
     #   text = "Hello World!"
     #   text.gsub(re, "*") # => "*Hello* *World*!"
     #   # Matches the word "and", but not "band"
     #   re2 = Regexp::English.new do
     #     literal("and").surrounded_by(word_boundary)
     #   end
     #   "band".match(re2)   # => nil
     #   "and".match(re2)[0] # => "and"
     def word_boundary; Node::Anchor.new(/\b/); end

If this test case where to fail you would get an useful error like this:

>   1) Failure:
> test_word_boundary()
>     [(eval):3:in `eval'
>      (eval):7:in `test_word_boundary'
>      (eval):3:in `test_word_boundary']:
> c:/ruby/lib/ruby/1.8/test/unit/assertions.rb:32:in `assert_block'<"\"*Hello* *World*!\""> expected but was <"\"Hello World!\"">.

> Yours,
> JeanHuguesRobert

Regards,
Florian Gross