Unittest's assertEqual and iterables - only check the contents
Python 3
- If you don't care about the order of the content, you have the assertCountEqual(a,b) method
- If you care about the order of the content, you have the assertSequenceEqual(a,b) method
Python >= 2.7
- If you don't care about the order of the content, you have the assertItemsEqual(a,b) method
- If you care about the order of the content, you have the assertSequenceEqual(a,b) method
You can always add your own assertion methods to your TestCase class:
def assertSequenceEqual(self, it1, it2): self.assertEqual(tuple(it1), tuple(it2))or take a look at how 2.7 defined it: http://hg.python.org/cpython/file/14cafb8d1480/Lib/unittest/case.py#l621
It looks to me you care about the order of items in the sequences. Therefore, assertItemsEqual/assertCountEqual is not for you.
In Python 2.7 and in Python 3, what you want is self.assertSequenceEqual. This is sensitive to the order of the items.