What is actually assertEquals in Python?

Question

I have the following test.py file in django. can you please explain this code?

from contacts.models import Contact
...
class ContactTests(TestCase):
    """Contact model tests."""

    def test_str(self):

        contact = Contact(first_name='John', last_name='Smith')

        self.assertEquals(
            str(contact),
            'John Smith',
        )

Answer 1

from contacts.models import Contact  # import model Contact
...
class ContactTests(TestCase):  # start a test case
    """Contact model tests."""

    def test_str(self):  # start one test

        contact = Contact(first_name='John', last_name='Smith')  # create a Contact object with 2 params like that

        self.assertEquals(  # check if str(contact) == 'John Smith'
            str(contact),  
            'John Smith',
        )

Basically it will check if str(contact) == 'John Smith', if not then assert equal is failed and the test is failed and it will notify you the error at that line.

In other words, assertEquals is a function to check if two variables are equal, for purposes of automated testing:

def assertEquals(var1, var2):
    if var1 == var2:
        return True
    else:
        return False

Hope it helps.

Answer 2

assertEquals is a (deprecated) alias for TestCase.assertEqual, which is a method on the unittest.TestCase class.

It forms a test assertion; where str(contact) must be equal to 'John Smith' for the test to pass.

The form with s has been marked as deprecated since 2010, but they've not actually been removed, and there is no concrete commitment to remove them at this point. If you run your tests with deprecation warnings enabled (as recommended in PEP 565) you'd see a warning:

test.py:42: DeprecationWarning: Please use assertEqual instead.
  self.assertEquals(

Answer 3

assertEquals is deprecated since Python 3.2, you should use assertEqual (no s).

Or pytest.