Python: How to access test result variables from unittest module

After some days of researching, I sent an email to [email protected] and got the perfect solution for my issue. The answer I got was:

I suspect that the reason that you're having trouble getting unittest to do that is that that's not the sort of thing that unittest was written to do. A hint that that's the case seems to me to be that over at the documentation:

https://docs.python.org/3/library/unittest.html

there's a section on the command-line interface but nothing much about using the module as an imported module.

A bit of Googling yields this recipe:

http://code.activestate.com/recipes/578866-python-unittest-obtain-the-results-of-all-the-test/

Which looks as though it might be useful to you but I can't vouch for it and it seems to involve replacing one of the library's files. (Replacing one of the library's files is perfectly reasonable in my opinion. The point of Python's being open-source is that you can hack it for yourself.)

But if I were doing what you're describing, I'd probably write my own testing code. You could steal what you found useful from unittest (kind of the inverse of changing the library in place). Or you might find that your needs are sufficiently simple that a simple file of testing code was sufficient.

If none of that points to a solution, let us know what you get and I'll try to think some more.

Regards, Matt

After changing my result.py module from unittest, I'm able to access the value of the test (True, False, or Error).

Thank you very much, Matt.

P.S. I edited my question so it was more clear and didn't have unnecessary code.

You can use pdb to debug this issue, in the test simply add these two lines to halt execution and begin debugging.

import pdb pdb.settrace()

Now for good testing practice you want deterministic test results, a test that fails only sometimes is not a good test. I recommend mocking the random function and using data sets that capture the errors you find.