doctest in Pythonwin

[Terry Reedy]

<posted and mailed>
"Tim Peters" <tim.one at comcast.net> wrote in message
news:mailman.1028945596.24353.python-list at python.org...

> [Terry Reedy]
<'complaing' about...>
> > >>> *** Tester.merge: 'doctesttest' in both testers; summing
outcomes.

> I'm betting you ran a doctest more than once in your PythonWin
session,

Of course.  Once the call is there, its there (unless #ed out, which
maybe it mostly should be until the file is finished).

>and that you didn't get this message the very first time you ran a
doctest.

I started over today and you are correct: it only appears on
subsequent runs.  Upon adding 'verbose=1', I also discovered that the
message is a symptom of a much deeper problem: doctest *does not
reread* the revised doc strings.  So yesterday, when I first ran with
no tests, there never were any.  Today it ran all 7, but continued to
run the same 7 even after I changed doc strings to and and subtract
examples.

>  As explained in doctest's large docstrings <wink>, advanced uses of
doctest
> rely on that doctest maintains state across invocations, in order to
merge
> results from multiple runs.  If you run a test with a given name
more than
> once, the grand-summary accumulator inside doctest spits out that
message to
> let you know you're (at best) double-counting.  It would often be
better if
> IDEs spawned a new process when running files (there are many ways
you can
> get tripped up in IDLE, and I expect PythonWin too, by that
sys.modules
> persists across script runs).
>
> In this particular case, you can worm around it by doing
>
> import doctest
> doctest.master = None
>
> before each doctest run (that destroys doctest's accumulator -- but
doctest
> will create it again, so you have to keep doing this).

The added line nulling doctest.master cures the symptom but not the
disease: the merge message no longer appears but doc strings are
*still* not reread.  Reloading  the doctest module does not work, but
reloading the module being tested does!  So here is my doctest.__doc__
patch:  At the end of the section beginning
---
NORMAL USAGE

In normal use, end each module M with:

def _test():
    import doctest, M           # replace M with your module's name
    return doctest.testmod(M)   # ditto
---
add
---
If you are using doctest for files edited in an IDE (such as idle,
Pythonwin) and you run a file with doctest enabled more than once in
an editing sesssion, _test may need two more lines to reset:

def _test():
    import doctest, M                # replace M with your module's
name
    doctest.master = None
    reload(M)                           # ditto
    return doctest.testmod(M)   # ditto

----

Terry J. Reedy