I need to test a function that needs to query a page on an external server using urllib.urlopen (it also uses urllib.urlencode). The server could be down, the page could change; I can't rely on it for a test.
What is the best way to control what urllib.urlopen returns?
Another simple approach is to have your test override urllib's urlopen()
function. For example, if your module has
import urllib
def some_function_that_uses_urllib():
...
urllib.urlopen()
...
You could define your test like this:
import mymodule
def dummy_urlopen(url):
...
mymodule.urllib.urlopen = dummy_urlopen
Then, when your tests invoke functions in mymodule
, dummy_urlopen()
will be called instead of the real urlopen()
. Dynamic languages like Python make it super easy to stub out methods and classes for testing.
See my blog posts at http://softwarecorner.wordpress.com/ for more information about stubbing out dependencies for tests.
I am using Mock's patch decorator:
from mock import patch
[...]
@patch('urllib.urlopen')
def test_foo(self, urlopen_mock):
urlopen_mock.return_value = MyUrlOpenMock()
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