Interlude - Write Python Doctests interactive

Python offers simple methods to enter interactive mode. Some years ago I thought its a good idea to use it while writing doctests. On a 5h train ride from Innsbruck to Vienna I digged into pythons code and doctest package and married both. Result was a tiny code snippet I cut'n'pasted all the time into my tests. Also ArchGenXML generates it when generating test-stubs.

Now I released it under the name interlude on PyPI: http://pypi.python.org/pypi/interlude

After easy_install it - or include in buildout usage is now dumb easy:

1. import interlude
   
2. Give your doctest.DocFileSuite( ... ) an kwarg globs of type dict with key 'interact' and value interlude.interact, like:
   

   import interlude
   def test_suite():
       return unittest.TestSuite([
           doctest.DocFileSuite(
               'interludetest.txt', 
               globs=dict(interact=interlude.interact, ),
           ),])
   

3. in your doctest add a >>> interact(locals())

This results in a interpreter shell and looks like:

jensens@minime:~/DEV/interludetest/$ ./bin/test
Running tests at level 1
Installing interludetest ... done (0.007s)
Running unit tests:
  Running:
...................
=====================================================
Interlude DocTest Interactive Console - (c) BlueDynamics Alliance
Note: You have the same locals available as in your test-case. 
Ctrl-D ends session and continues testing.

>>> seqDT[0]
datetime.datetime(2008, 8, 26, 23, 59, tzinfo=<UTC>)

>>> [pressed Ctrl-D]

end of DocTest Interactive Console session
=====================================================

  Ran 19 tests with 0 failures and 0 errors in 78.630 seconds.

jensens@minime:~/DEV/interludetest/$