I am looking for a method (if available) that can compare two values and raise an assertion error with a meaningful message when the comparison fails. If I use assert, the failure message does not contain what values were compared when then assertion failed. >>> a = 3 >>> b = 4 >>> assert a == b Traceback (most recent call last): File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module> AssertionError >>> If I use the assertEqual() method from the unittest.TestCase package, the assertion message contains the values that were compared. a = 3 b = 4 > self.assertEqual(a, b) E AssertionError: 3 != 4 Note that, here, the assertion error message contains the values that were compared. That is very useful in real-life scenarios and hence necessary for me. The plain assert (see above) does not do that. However, so far, I could use assertEqual() only in the class that inherits from unittest.TestCase and provides few other required methods like runTest(). I want to use assertEqual() anywhere, not only in the inherited classes. Is that possible? I tried the following but they did not work. >>> import unittest >>> unittest.TestCase.assertEqual(a, b) Traceback (most recent call last): File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module> TypeError: unbound method failUnlessEqual() must be called with TestCase instance as first argument (got int instance instead) >>> >>> >>> tc = unittest.TestCase() Traceback (most recent call last): File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module> File "/usr/lib64/python2.6/unittest.py", line 215, in __init__ (self.__class__, methodName) ValueError: no such test method in <class 'unittest.TestCase'>: runTest >>> Is there any other package or library that offers similar methods like assertEqual() that can be easily used without additional constraints? Continue reading...
