unit testing - How to assert output with nosetest/unittest in python?

Question

I'm writing tests for a function like next one:

def foo():
    print 'hello world!'

So when I want to test this function the code will be like this:

import sys
from foomodule import foo
def test_foo():
    foo()
    output = sys.stdout.getline().strip() # because stdout is an StringIO instance
    assert output == 'hello world!'

But if I run nosetests with -s parameter the test crashes. How can I catch the output with unittest or nose module?

Answer 1

I use this context manager to capture output. It ultimately uses the same technique as some of the other answers by temporarily replacing sys.stdout. I prefer the context manager because it wraps all the bookkeeping into a single function, so I don't have to re-write any try-finally code, and I don't have to write setup and teardown functions just for this.

import sys
from contextlib import contextmanager
from StringIO import StringIO

@contextmanager
def captured_output():
    new_out, new_err = StringIO(), StringIO()
    old_out, old_err = sys.stdout, sys.stderr
    try:
        sys.stdout, sys.stderr = new_out, new_err
        yield sys.stdout, sys.stderr
    finally:
        sys.stdout, sys.stderr = old_out, old_err

Use it like this:

with captured_output() as (out, err):
    foo()
# This can go inside or outside the `with` block
output = out.getvalue().strip()
self.assertEqual(output, 'hello world!')

Furthermore, since the original output state is restored upon exiting the with block, we can set up a second capture block in the same function as the first one, which isn't possible using setup and teardown functions, and gets wordy when writing try-finally blocks manually. That ability came in handy when the goal of a test was to compare the results of two functions relative to each other rather than to some precomputed value.