unit testing offline with mechanize

[Adam Akhtar]

Although mechanize is designed to navigate around web pages online, is
there a way to load up webpages saved to the harddrive for the purposes
of quick unit testing. Constantly accessing online sources slows down
the tests. I tried to simply type the file name instead of the url in
agent.get("..") but it complains. I tried get_file and that didnt work
either.

any help greatly appreciated.

 

[Phlip]

Although mechanize is designed to navigate around web pages online, is
there a way to load up webpages saved to the harddrive for the purposes
of quick unit testing. Constantly accessing online sources slows down
the tests. I tried to simply type the file name instead of the url in
agent.get("..") but it complains. I tried get_file and that didnt work
either.

That sounds like the assumption you must serve a page through a web server just
to unit test it.

Why not do what Rails tests do - call the same method a server would call to
generate a page, then read it as a string and test it?

 

[Lex Williams]

a tip would be to save the page with mechanize , read it then locally
within a script , get your regexes ( or whatever you're doing to parse
the data ) right , and then try them on the online version .