The Python Apprentice

Unit testing example: text analysis

With those concepts in mind, let's see how we can actually use the unittest module in practice. For this example, we'll use test-driven development to write a simple text-analysis function. This function will take a file name as its only parameter. It will then read that file and calculate:

• The number of lines in the file
• The number of characters in the file

TDD is an iterative development process, so rather than work at the REPL we'll put the code for our tests in a file named text_analyzer.py. To start with, we'll create our first test with just enough supporting code to actually run it:

# text_analyzer.pyimport unittestclass TextAnalysisTests(unittest.TestCase): """Tests for the ``analyze_text()`` ...