Unit tests for HTML Output?

user_285084 0
Viewed 18997

This may be a dumb question, but do you make unit tests for the HTML output of your PHP functions/scripts?

I try to keep my HTML and my PHP separate - i.e. HTML includes with placeholders, and functions for certain recurring elements (tabular data / any sort of looped output) - but I'm not sure how to go about verifying this.

Is there a standard way to go about such things, or is it mainly a matter of using regular unit tests on functions which create the inserted content, and then making sure it looks correct in the browser/W3C Validator?

Thanks.

Edit: I guess a corollary to this would be: are these sorts of unit tests even worth having? If you're keeping your content and structure properly separated, then you would really only be testing a handful of includes in very limited scenarios (presumably, anyway). Is it really worth it to semi-hand-craft full pages just to have a file to compare to?

templates unit-testing html php
9 Answers

Running into this question myself. I think an approach might be to use something like phpQuery to make your tests less fragile. Instead of testing for exact output, test that there should be an h3 tag ~somewhere~ in the output. If it gets wrapped in a div later because a designer needed to tack on an extra background, or because of some ie6 float bug workaround, then your test still works.

It's not very pure, but still potentially a very useful tool.

user_2023920

A lot of these links are either dead or old. Take a look at http://phpfui.com/PHPFUI/HTMLUnitTester It validated HTML and CSS against w3.org standards. I wrote it because I could not find any recent and currently supported PHP library to do it. Other solutions were based on an old version of PHPUnit or not compatible with modern PHP code.

It uses the W3C HTML validator service which I would recommend running locally. It is all explained in the readme file in configuration. The beauty of the library is that it does not do the actual validation, but calls the W3C.org code, so it will always be up to date if you keep your local install current.

Hope this helps.

user_40815330
Related