[Haskell-cafe] HUnit and table-driven tests

[Matthew]

On Sun, Aug 5, 2012 at 12:32 AM, Henk-Jan van Tuyl <hjgtuyl at chello.nl> wrote:
> On Sun, 05 Aug 2012 03:21:39 +0200, Matthew <wonderzombie at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> I've got a function which takes in two chars, describing a playing
>> card and a suit. An example would be 4C or TH for a 4 of Clubs or a
>> Ten of Hearts. I need to be able to compare the ranks of a card (e.g.
>> a King is 13), so a Card is a tuple of rank and suit. The function
>> which parses a Card is type String -> Maybe Card.
>>
>> I'm writing unit tests for this using HUnit, and ideally I'd go with a
>> table-driven[1] approach, where each test case is a tuple of the input
>> and the expected output. (Possibly I could expand this to a triple, or
>> simply a list, to allow for an error message for each test case.) Then
>> all the test function has to do is run through each case and assert as
>> necessary. Example: [("TH", Just (Hearts, 10)), ("XH", Nothing)].
>
>
> A simple solution:
>
>> parseCard :: String -> Maybe Card
>> parseCard string = <your function to test>
>> test :: Bool
>> test =  all testEqual [("TH", Just (Hearts, 10)), ("XH", Nothing)]
>>     where
>>       testEqual (input, output) = parseCard input == output
>
>
> For a description of 'all', see:
> http://hackage.haskell.org/packages/archive/base/latest/doc/html/Prelude.html#v:all

Thanks for the response. The one problem I have with this is that it
will not be at all obvious which test case (or cases!) failed.

That said, maybe I could do something similar, with a Writer? A passed
test writes "", but a failed one writes a test-specific failure
message. Then the test itself uses this string as the assert message.

>
> Regards,
> Henk-Jan van Tuyl
>
>
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