This vignette will teach you how to create a unit test shell for all of the examples in an entire package’s documentation.

Setup

First, let’s set up a dummy package called tempkg with just the detect.R and match.R files from the source code of the stringr package.

usethis::create_package("tempkg", open = FALSE)

#> ✓ Creating './'

#> ✓ Creating 'R/'

#> ✓ Writing 'DESCRIPTION'

#> ✓ Writing 'NAMESPACE'

fs::file_copy(
  system.file("extdata", c("detect.R", "match.R"), package = "exampletestr"),
  "tempkg/R/"
)

Now let’s move into the tempkg directory:

setwd("tempkg/")

and set the active project:

usethis::proj_set(".")

Main event

The detect.R file looks like this (well, I’ve abbreviated it slightly):

#' Detect the presence or absence of a pattern in a string.
#'
#' Vectorised over `string` and `pattern`.
#'
#' @param string Input vector. Either a character vector, or something
#'  coercible to one.
#' @param pattern Pattern to look for.
#'
#' @return A logical vector.
#'
#' @export
#' @examples
#' fruit <- c("apple", "banana", "pear", "pinapple")
#' str_detect(fruit, "a")
#' str_detect(fruit, "^a")
#' str_detect(fruit, "a$")
#' str_detect(fruit, "b")
#' str_detect(fruit, "[aeiou]")
str_detect <- function(string, pattern) {
  switch(type(pattern),
    empty = ,
    bound = str_count(string, pattern) > 0,
    fixed = stri_detect_fixed(string, pattern, opts_fixed = opts(pattern)),
    coll = stri_detect_coll(string, pattern, opts_collator = opts(pattern)),
    regex = stri_detect_regex(string, pattern, opts_regex = opts(pattern))
  )
}

We can make a unit tests shell file for each .R file in the package using make_tests_shells_pkg():

make_tests_shells_pkg()

This outputs test-detect.R and test-match.R files in the tests/testthat folder. As an example of what to do next, the test-detect.R file has contents

test_that("`str_detect()` works", {
  fruit <- c("apple", "banana", "pear", "pinapple")
  expect_equal(str_detect(fruit, "a"), )
  expect_equal(str_detect(fruit, "^a"), )
  expect_equal(str_detect(fruit, "a$"), )
  expect_equal(str_detect(fruit, "b"), )
  expect_equal(str_detect(fruit, "[aeiou]"), )
  expect_equal(str_detect("aecfg", letters), )
})

which can be sensibly completed as

test_that("`str_detect()` works", {
  fruit <- c("apple", "banana", "pear", "pinapple")
  expect_equal(str_detect(fruit, "a"), rep(TRUE, 4))
  expect_equal(str_detect(fruit, "^a"), c(TRUE, rep(FALSE, 3)))
  expect_equal(str_detect(fruit, "a$"), c(FALSE, TRUE, FALSE, FALSE))
  expect_equal(str_detect(fruit, "b"), c(FALSE, TRUE, FALSE, FALSE))
  expect_equal(str_detect(fruit, "[aeiou]"), rep(TRUE, 4))
  expect_equal(
    str_detect("aecfg", letters),
    letters %in% c("a", "c", "e", "f", "g")
  )
})

test-match.R must similarly be completed.

A whole package

2021-08-07

Setup

Main event

Cleanup