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Xdoctest - Execute Doctests

Xdoctest is a Python package for executing tests in documentation strings!

What is a doctest? It is example code you write in a docstring! What is a docstring? Its a string you use as a comment! They get attached to Python functions and classes as metadata. They are often used to auto-generate documentation. Why is it cool? Because you can write tests while you code!

Xdoctest finds and executes your doctests for you. Just run xdoctest <path-to-my-module>. It plugs into pytest to make it easy to run on a CI. Install and run pytest --xdoctest.

The xdoctest package is a re-write of Python’s builtin doctest module. It replaces the old regex-based parser with a new abstract-syntax-tree based parser (using Python’s ast module). The goal is to make doctests easier to write, simpler to configure, and encourage the pattern of test driven development.

Read the docs

http://xdoctest.readthedocs.io/en/latest

Github

https://github.com/Erotemic/xdoctest

Pypi

https://pypi.org/project/xdoctest

PyCon 2020

Youtube Video and Google Slides

Getting Started 0: Installation

First ensure that you have Python installed and ideally are in a virtual environment. Install xdoctest using the pip.

pip install xdoctest

Alternatively you can install xdoctest with optional packages.

pip install xdoctest[all]

This ensures that the pygments and colorama packages are installed, which are required to color terminal output.

Getting Started 1: Your first doctest

If you already know how to write a doctest then you can skip to the next section. If you aren’t familiar with doctests, this will help get you up to speed.

Consider the following implementation the Fibonacci function.

def fib(n):
     """
     Python 3: Fibonacci series up to n
     """
     a, b = 0, 1
     while a < n:
         print(a, end=' ')
         a, b = b, a+b
     print()

We can add a “doctest” in the “docstring” as both an example and a test of the code. All we have to do is prefix the doctest code with three right chevrons `` >>> ``. We can also use xdoctest directives to control the flow of doctest execution.

def fib(n):
    """
    Python 3: Fibonacci series up to n

    Example:
        >>> fib(1000) # xdoctest: +SKIP
        0 1 1 2 3 5 8 13 21 34 55 89 144 233 377 610 987
    """
    a, b = 0, 1
    while a < n:
        print(a, end=' ')
        a, b = b, a+b
    print()

Now if this text was in a file called fib.py you could execute your doctest by running xdoctest fib.py. Note that if fib.py was in a package called mymod, you could equivalently run xdoctest -m mymod.fib. In other words you can all doctests in a file by passing xdoctest the module name or the module path.

Interestingly because this documentation is written in the xdoctest/__init__.py file, which is a Python file, that means we can write doctests in it. If you have xdoctest installed, you can use the xdoctest cli to execute the following code: xdoctest -m xdoctest.__init__ __doc__:0. Also notice that the previous code prefixed with >>> `` is skipped due to the xdoctest ``SKIP directive. For more information on directives see the docs for the xdoctest directive module.

>>> # Python 3: Fibonacci series up to n
>>> def fib(n):
>>>     a, b = 0, 1
>>>     while a < n:
>>>         print(a, end=' ')
>>>         a, b = b, a+b
>>>     print()
>>> fib(25)
0 1 1 2 3 5 8 13 21

Getting Started 2: Running your doctests

There are two ways to run xdoctest: (1) pytest or (2) the native xdoctest interface. The native interface is less opaque and implicit, but its purpose is to run doctests. The other option is to use the widely used pytest package. This allows you to run both unit tests and doctests with the same command and has many other advantages.

It is recommended to use pytest for automatic testing (e.g. in your CI scripts), but for debugging it may be easier to use the native interface.

Using the pytest interface

When pytest is run, xdoctest is automatically discovered, but is disabled by default. This is because xdoctest needs to replace the builtin pytest._pytest.doctest plugin.

To enable this plugin, run pytest with --xdoctest or --xdoc. This can either be specified on the command line or added to your addopts options in the [pytest] section of your pytest.ini or tox.ini.

To run a specific doctest, xdoctest sets up pytest node names for these doctests using the following pattern: <path/to/file.py>::<callname>:<num>. For example a doctest for a function might look like this mymod.py::funcname:0, and a class method might look like this: mymod.py::ClassName::method:0

Using the native interface.

The xdoctest module contains a pytest plugin, but also contains a native command line interface (CLI). The CLI is generated using argparse.

For help you can run

xdoctest --help

which produces something similar to the following output:

usage: xdoctest [-h] [--version] [-m MODNAME] [-c COMMAND] [--style {auto,google,freeform}] [--analysis {auto,static,dynamic}] [--durations DURATIONS] [--time]
                [--colored COLORED] [--nocolor] [--offset] [--report {none,cdiff,ndiff,udiff,only_first_failure}] [--options OPTIONS] [--global-exec GLOBAL_EXEC]
                [--verbose VERBOSE] [--quiet] [--silent]
                [arg ...]

Xdoctest 1.0.0 - on Python - 3.9.9 (main, Jan  6 2022, 18:33:12)
[GCC 10.3.0] - discover and run doctests within a python package

positional arguments:
  arg                   Ignored if optional arguments are specified, otherwise: Defaults --modname to arg.pop(0). Defaults --command to arg.pop(0). (default: None)

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  --version             Display version info and quit (default: False)
  -m MODNAME, --modname MODNAME
                        Module name or path. If specified positional modules are ignored (default: None)
  -c COMMAND, --command COMMAND
                        A doctest name or a command (list|all|<callname>). Defaults to all (default: None)
  --style {auto,google,freeform}
                        Choose the style of doctests that will be parsed (default: auto)
  --analysis {auto,static,dynamic}
                        How doctests are collected (default: auto)
  --durations DURATIONS
                        Specify execution times for slowest N tests.N=0 will show times for all tests (default: None)
  --time                Same as if durations=0 (default: False)
  --colored COLORED     Enable or disable ANSI coloration in stdout (default: True)
  --nocolor             Disable ANSI coloration in stdout
  --offset              If True formatted source linenumbers will agree with their location in the source file. Otherwise they will be relative to the doctest itself. (default:
                        False)
  --report {none,cdiff,ndiff,udiff,only_first_failure}
                        Choose another output format for diffs on xdoctest failure (default: udiff)
  --options OPTIONS     Default directive flags for doctests (default: None)
  --global-exec GLOBAL_EXEC
                        Custom Python code to execute before every test (default: None)
  --verbose VERBOSE     Verbosity level. 0 is silent, 1 prints out test names, 2 additionally prints test stdout, 3 additionally prints test source (default: 3)
  --quiet               sets verbosity to 1
  --silent              sets verbosity to 0

The xdoctest interface can be run programmatically using xdoctest.doctest_module(path), which can be placed in the __main__ section of any module as such:

if __name__ == '__main__':
    import xdoctest
    xdoctest.doctest_module(__file__)

This sets up the ability to invoke the xdoctest command line interface by invoking your module as a main script: python -m <modname> <command>, where <modname> is the name of your module (e.g. foo.bar) and command follows the following rules:

  • If <command> is all, then each enabled doctest in the module is executed: python -m <modname> all

  • If <command> is list, then the names of each enabled doctest is listed.

  • If <command> is dump, then all doctests are converted into a format suitable for unit testing, and dumped to stdout (new in 0.4.0).

  • If <command> is a “callname” (name of a function or a class and method), then that specific doctest is executed: python -m <modname> <callname>. Note: you can execute disabled doctests or functions without any arguments (zero-args) this way.

XDoctest is a good demonstration of itself. After pip installing xdoctest, try running xdoctest on xdoctest.

xdoctest xdoctest

If you would like a slightly less verbose output, try

xdoctest xdoctest --verbose=1

# or

xdoctest xdoctest --verbose=0

You could also consider running xdoctests tests through pytest:

pytest $(python -c 'import xdoctest, pathlib; print(pathlib.Path(xdoctest.__file__).parent)') --xdoctest

If you would like a slightly more verbose output, try

pytest -s --verbose --xdoctest-verbose=3 --xdoctest $(python -c 'import xdoctest, pathlib; print(pathlib.Path(xdoctest.__file__).parent)')

If you ran these commands, the myriad of characters that flew across your screen are lots more examples of what you can do with doctests.

You can also run doctests inside Jupyter Notebooks.

Package Layout

Indices and tables