Using Test::* modules outside of a TAP context

I totally blame Tim Bunce for this one.

You see, I was happily minding my business today, until I got sight of Tim’s tweet bemoaning the fact that Test::Difference tests can’t easily be used outside of a test harness. Darn him, that’s exactly the kind of happy little puzzle I can’t resist.

So I began to think about it. Of course, the Right Solution is probably to add alternative non-TAP-tied functions to the test modules themselves. But what if you just want to quickly leverage the module’s functionality without having to re-arrange its innards? Well, most test modules use Test::Builder, so there’s surely ways to twist that to our advantage. After a hour or two of hacking, I think I got one.

My little experience is named Test::Wrapper, and as usual can be found on github. In a nutshell, Test::Wrapper takes the tests that you want to use and gleefully bastardize the underlaying Test::Builder mechanisms such that nothing is output. Instead, the tests return an object that contains it all.

For example, if we want to use eq_or_diff from Test::Differences, we can do

    use 5.10.0;
    use Test::Differences;
    use Test::Wrapper qw/ eq_or_diff /;
    my $test = eq_or_diff "foo" => "bar";
    say $test->is_success ? 'pass' : 'fail';
    # yes! prints the whole diff table
    say "output: ", $test->diag;
    # also come with overloading voodoo
    say $test ? 'pass' : 'fail';
    say "output: $test";

As mentioned above, this comes with the price of totally messing up with Test::Builder, so using it intermixed with “real” tests is not an option. And it has doubtlessly a thousand gotchas I didn’t think about. But, still, I must say that I like it despite (or because) its devious hijacking nature. I might even push it to CPAN it if proves to be useful to anyone (myself included).