Course of Raku / Advanced / Testing and documentation 🆕 / Testing 🆕

Comparisons and plans

Beyond ok and is, the Test module has comparisons for different kinds of value. The most useful are:

• is — compares two values for equality (as strings/numbers)
• is-deeply — compares two data structures for exact, type-aware equality
• like — checks that a string matches a regex
• isnt — passes when two values are not equal

is-deeply is the right choice for arrays, hashes, and nested data, because it compares structure and type precisely:

use Test;

my @reversed = (1, 2, 3).reverse;
is-deeply @reversed, [3, 2, 1], 'reversed';

done-testing;

This prints:

ok 1 - reversed
1..1

Where is would stringify and compare loosely, is-deeply insists the structures truly match. Note that done-testing puts the plan 1..1 at the end, after the check.

Instead of letting done-testing count the tests for you, you can state the number up front with plan. This guards against a test file that exits early and silently skips checks:

use Test;

plan 2;
ok True,  'first';
ok 1 < 2, 'second';

This time the plan comes first, ahead of the results:

1..2
ok 1 - first
ok 2 - second

That is the visible difference from done-testing: plan prints the count 1..2 at the top, before any checks run, whereas done-testing prints it at the very end. Either way, with plan 2 the run expects exactly two tests; if fewer (or more) actually run, the suite is reported as failing. Use plan when the count is fixed and known, and done-testing when it is easier to let the framework count.

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