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DocSix: Doctests on Python 2 & 3

I was first introduced to doctests working on Zope 3 at early PyCon sprints. At the time the combination of documentation, specification, and test in a single document seemed pretty interesting to me. These days I like to use them for testing my documentation.

Last week stvs2fork helpfully opened a pull request for Rebar , fixing some syntax that’s no longer valid in Python 3. I decided that it’d be interesting to add Python 3.3 to the automated test runs . Fixing the code to work with Python 3 was easy enough, but when I ran the doctests I discovered an issue I hadn’t thought of:

Unicode string output looks different in Python 3 vs Python 2..

>>> validator = AgeValidator()
>>> validator.errors({'age': 'ten'})
{'age': [u'An integer is required.']}

This example works exactly the same in Python 2 and 3: in both cases the error messages are returned as a list of Unicode strings. But in Python 2 the output has the leading u indicator. Not so in Python 3.

What I needed to do is strip the Unicode indicator from the output strings before executing the test; then I’d have the Python 3 doctest I needed. So I wrote a tool that lets me do that.

DocSix lets you run your doctests on Python 2 and 3.

DocSix builds on Manuel , a library for mixing custom test syntax into doctests. DocSix can work with existing uses of Manuel, or it can load your doctests into a unittest TestSuite , ready to go:

from docsix import get_doctest_suite

test_suite = get_doctest_suite(
    'index.rst',
    'advanced.rst',
)

Potentially useful links: