Lately I’ve been doing most of my testing with doctest, primarily using stand-alone text files. I generally like it (otherwise I wouldn’t be using it), but it does make me frustrated with doctest sometimes. On my wishlist (roughly in order):

• I wish output was always displayed, even when there’s an exception. I see no reason for the current behavior. Really exceptions could be treated like any other output (if ELLIPSIS was on by default).

• I wish you could turn on options like ELLIPSIS from within a doctest, for all expressions. (# doctest: +ELLIPSIS on every line is beyond ugly.)

• <BLANKLINE> is terribly ugly.

• There’s no way of saying “I don’t care what this prints”. You can’t do:

  >>> some_function()
  ...
  

  because the ... is treated like a continuation.

• Plugging in an alternate output checker is kind of tedious, and can’t be done from within a doctest (without horrible hacks).

• I’d like to be able to easily jump into an interactive state from doctest. Maybe pdb can do this, but I’ve never figured that out exactly.

• Getting nose to run .txt files as doctests is really hard, involving a combination of options I always forget.

• There’s no way to abort the doctest. Sometimes I’d like to run some environment checks early on, and be able to stop the test if they fail.

• I wish it was easier to apply to non-Python code. (I’ve adapted it via subclassing for Logo but I wouldn’t do that often.)

• I wish I could copy and paste from doctests to consoles. But I don’t see any solution to this problem.

• The integration with unittest is pretty hacky. Not that I’ve used unittest in years. But some other test frameworks build off this integration.

• python -m doctest sometest.txt doesn’t do what it should do. Instead it runs doctest’s self-tests.