Advanced Checks

Rich comparison

Imagine that you want to check how many words has a file but you cannot check the exact count.

Instead you are ok if the file has more than x words.

How to do that in byexample?

Just combine different runners capturing the output of one and pasting it into another where the comparison that you want can be much easier to implement.

For me, Python is my first choice

$ wc -w test/ds/about-lic.doc | xargs
<count> test/ds/about-lic.doc

>>> <count> > 50        # byexample: +paste
True

Use the pretty printer

True story: a program logs into a file a set of dictionaries, something like this:

$ cat test/ds/log
Sep 30 15:44:01 system: Loaded modules
Sep 30 15:44:01 system: Status {"network": {"eth0": True, "wifi0": False, "wifi1": False, "eth1": True, "eth2": False}, "disk": True, "io": True}

Unfortunately the Status dictionary may be printed with its keys in an arbitrary order so checking it directly will not always work.

We could parse the log and do a more manual check… or we could think out of the box and combine different runners again:

$ cat test/ds/log
Sep 30 15:44:01 system: Loaded modules
Sep 30 15:44:01 system: Status <dict>

>>> <dict>              # byexample: +paste +diff=ndiff
{'disk': True,
 'io': True,
 'network': {'eth0': True,
             'eth1': True,
             'eth2': False,
             'wifi0': False,
             'wifi1': False}}

Some runners like Python and Ruby enable by default a pretty printer: native objects, specially the deeply nested ones, are printed in a nice deterministic human way.

Tip: for long and complex outputs like this one, you may want to use a differ that can highlight the small differences in case the example fail.