Small tip for porting unit tests to Python 3.0

While working on increasing test coverage of Crunchy, I encountered a puzzling change when running doctest based unit tests under Python 3.0a and Python 2.5. One test (of a function that was definitely too long) was failing under Python 3.0a1/2 with a single line containing the number 20 appearing in the output - in addition to all the other expected ones. To make a long story short, the problem was linked to PEP 3116. Using Python 3.0a1/2, when a file is written using ".write()", there is a return value corresponding to the number of bytes written; the "old" behavior was to return None. In order to have doctest-based tests running successfully under both 2.x and 3.x, we need to replace things like

f.write()

by

dummy = f.write()

I understand that the plan is to backport many of the Python 3.0 features to Python 2.6 so as to ease the transition, and use an automated tool for the conversion. I don't think that features from PEP 3116 will be implemented in Python 2.6, since they are very different from 2.5. And I am doubtful that the conversion tool will take care of including a dummy assignment for functions that will now return a value different than None. I am hoping that this post might end up saving a little bit of time for any reader that tries to migrate their code from 2.x to 3.0.

On a different topic altogether, I have fixed the bug which resulted in removing the styles from remote web pages when using Python 3.0 in conjunction with Crunchy. This will make Crunchy a more attractive tool to use in going through the official Python tutorial for Python 3.0. For the moment, the Crunchy embedded interpreter still only works with Python 3.0a1 and not 3.0a2. Hopefully I'll have this resolved in new public release by Pycon 2008 so that Johannes can demonstrate it in his talk.