doctest fails to NORMALIZE_WHITESPACE ?

[Peter Otten]

David MacKay wrote:

> I really like doctest, but sometimes doctest gives a failure when the
> output looks absolutely fine to me -- indeed, even after I have gone to
> considerable effort to make my documentation match the output perfectly.

> The piece of source code concerned is here:
> 
>     >>> c = []; \
>         c.append(node(0.5,1,'a')); \
>         c.append(node(0.25,2,'b')); \
>         c.append(node(0.125,3,'c')); \
>         c.append(node(0.125,4,'d')); \
>         iterate(c) ; reportcode(c)               # doctest:

You have to suppress the return value of iterate()

          dummy = iterate(c); reportcode(c)

>         +NORMALIZE_WHITESPACE, +ELLIPSIS
>     #Symbol   Count   Codeword
>     a         (0.5)   1
>     b         (0.25)  01
>     c         (0.12)  000
>     d         (0.12)  001
>     """
> 

> And the output is:
> 
> Expected:
>     #Symbol     Count   Codeword
>     a         (0.5)     1

> Got:
>     <__main__.internalnode instance at 0xb7aee76c>

This is the result of iterate(c).  The interactive interpreter ignores None
return values but prints the repr() of everything else. doctest emulates
that behaviour.

Peter