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Python
String comparison function in Python (alpha)
22nd of December 2007
I was working on a unittest which when it failed would say "this string != that string" and because some of these strings were very long (output of a HTML lib I wrote which spits out snippets of HTML code) it became hard to spot how they were different. So I decided to override the usual self.assertEqual(str1, str2) in Python's unittest class instance with this little baby:
NOT, POINT = '-', '*'
if a != b:
print a
o = ''
for i, e in enumerate(a):
try:
if e != b[i]:
o += POINT
else:
o += NOT
except IndexError:
o += '*'
o += NOT * (len(a)-len(o))
if len(b) > len(a):
o += POINT* (len(b)-len(a))
print o
print b
raise AssertionError, '(see string comparison above)'
It's far from perfect and doesn't really work when you've got Unicode characters that the terminal you use can't print properly. It might not look great on strings that are really really long but I'm sure that's something that can be solved too. After all, this is just a quick hack that helped me spot that the difference between one snippet and another was that one produced <br/> and the other produced <br />. Below are some examples of this utility function in action.
Beware, you can use this in many different ways that fits your need so I'm not going to focus on how it's executed:
u.assertEqualLongString('Peter Bengtsson 123', 'Peter PengtsXon 124'); print ""
u.assertEqualLongString('Bengtsson','Bengtzzon'); print ""
u.assertEqualLongString('Bengtsson','BengtzzonLonger'); print ""
u.assertEqualLongString('BengtssonLonger','Bengtzzon'); print ""
u.assertEqualLongString('Bengtssonism','Bengtsson'); print ""
# Results:
Peter Bengtsson 123
------*-----*-----*
Peter PengtsXon 124
Bengtsson
-----**--
Bengtzzon
Bengtsson
-----**--******
BengtzzonLonger
BengtssonLonger
-----**--******
Bengtzzon
Bengtssonism
---------***
Bengtsson
Comment
Nice.
I've often used Python's difflib.ndiff to make test failures easier to understand, back when I wrote PyUnit-style unit tests. It was especially useful for multiline strings.
Nowadays with doctests getting readable diffs is easy (#doctest: +REPORT_NDIFF). Unless you're comparing several-thousand-line-long HTML pages in your functional tests.
Hi Peter,
I did the same thing recently, but I used the built-in difflib module to show me where the differences are. Might be worth a look. :)
HTH
Hi again,
Just FYI, I only posted a repeat of what others had already mentioned because with cookies off, I do not see any comments.
The warning about needing to turn on javascript in order to comment is nice, but with cookies off, you site looks like no one has commented.
Anyway, just thought I'd mention that. Sorry for the duplicate info.
Krys
It's not about cookies, it's just that the caching is set to 1 hour which might have tricked you. I haven't had the time to find a good solution to this yet.
lxml.html.usedoctest (and lxml.doctestcompare) implement a smarter comparison for HTML fragments. It's not perfect, but it's also somewhat less sensitive to unimportant differences in the HTML.
I love writing python oneliners :)
".join([x[0]==x[1] and "-" or "*" for x in map(None, a, b)])
in python2.5 you can use the trinary op to make it slightly more elegant