TAP::Parser

Ovid on 2006-07-04T08:56:16

Some of you may be happy to know that I've started writing TAP::Parser and should have an alpha out soon. I'll be out of town through Thursday, so that will put it on hold, but I have much of the core done.

Because of the nature of what I am parsing, a lot of semantic information is being pushed into the lexer itself and anything which is not a test plan or test line is discarded. So this:

TAP version 1
1..3
ok 1 - This is a test.
... and bogus info
ok 2 - This is only a test
# this will be discarded
!!! More garbage!
not ok 3 - Had this been an actual emergency ...
#   Failed test 'Had this been an actual emergency ...'
#   in foo.t at line 5.
#          got: '42'
#     expected: 'answer'

Gets reduced down to the following:

1..3
ok 1 - This is a test.
ok 2 - This is only a test
not ok 3 - Had this been an actual emergency ...

Yes, that means diagnostic and test failure information goes straight to /dev/null and no, I'm not happy with that either. Those, however, are my marching orders. Subscribe to the Perl QA list for more information as to why that is.

---

Funky!

Dom2 on 2006-07-04T14:10:33

That sounds really cool. I've been thinking about how to get Perl tests integrated into CruiseControl recently, and I reckon that turning TAP output into junit's XML format will probably go a long way...

Thanks,
-Dom

Re:Funky!

Ovid on 2006-07-04T14:27:20

Ah, cool. My first customer :)

The interface will probably look something like this:

my $parser = TAP::Parser->new($optional_version_number);

$parser->parse($tap); # croaks on bad TAP

print $parser->plan;
while ( my $test = $parser->tests ) {
    print $test->as_string;
    # or
    print $test->is_ok;        # boolean value
    print $test->ok;           # 'not ok' or 'ok'
    print $test->number;
    print $test->description;
    print $test->directive;    # TODO or SKIP data
}

I'll be out of town for the next couple of days celebrating a brother's graduation (and later recovering from said celebration), but I hope to return to this soon. It looks much easier than I thought, but the lexer tests took a while. Feature requests welcome.

Re:Funky!

Dom2 on 2006-07-04T15:59:36

Don't get too happy -- it's still in the thought stage over here. But I'll let you know when it gets down to some code...

-Dom

Re:Funky!

Alias on 2006-07-04T16:39:30

See Schwern!

I TOLD you we should have just gone with SAX itself as an event model :)

In any case, it should hopefully be easy to move between the two.