Test Anything Protocol

The Test Anything Protocol (TAP) is a protocol to allow communication between unit tests and a test harness. It allows individual tests (TAP producers) to communicate test results to the testing harness in a language-agnostic way. Originally developed for unit testing of the Perl interpreter in 1987, producers and parsers are now available for many development platforms.

This article is about the software unit testing protocol known as TAP. For the network tunnel driver, see TUN/TAP.

History

TAP was created for the first version of the Perl programming language (released in 1987), as part of the Perl's core test harness (t/TEST). The Test::Harness module was written by Tim Bunce and Andreas König to allow Perl module authors to take advantage of TAP. It became the de facto standard for Perl testing.[1][2][3]

Development of TAP, including standardization of the protocol, writing of test producers and consumers, and evangelizing the language is coordinated at the TestAnything website.[4]

As a protocol which is agnostic of programming language, TAP unit testing libraries expanded beyond their Perl roots and have been developed for various languages and systems such as PostgreSQL[5], MySQL[6], JavaScript[7] and other implementations listed on the project site.[4] A TAP C library is included as part of the FreeBSD Unix distribution and is used in the system's regression test suite.[8]

Specification

A formal specification for this protocol exists in the TAP::Spec::Parser and TAP::Parser::Grammar modules. The behavior of the Test::Harness module is the de facto TAP standard implementation, along with a writeup of the specification on http://testanything.org.

A project to produce an IETF standard for TAP was initiated in August 2008, at YAPC::Europe 2008.[4]

Usage examples

Here's an example of TAP's general format:

1..48
ok 1 Description # Directive
# Diagnostic
....
ok 47 Description
ok 48 Description

For example, a test file's output might look like:

1..4
ok 1 - Input file opened
not ok 2 - First line of the input valid.
    More output from test 2. There can be
    arbitrary number of lines for any output
    so long as there is at least some kind
    of whitespace at beginning of line.
ok 3 - Read the rest of the file
#TAP meta information
not ok 4 - Summarized correctly # TODO: not written yet
gollark: > are they thoyes.> 40 years for us to figure out mass recycling idkI mean, maybe, but you still have to go out to the deserts and replace all of them, and they'll slowly degrade in effectiveness before that.
gollark: I think because the main advantage was that it wouldn't produce neutrons in some sort of fusion reaction, and neutrons cause problems, except it still would because of the fuels each fusing with themselves.
gollark: I think I read somewhere that it wasn't very useful (he3) but i forgot why.
gollark: I too want vast swathes of land to be covered in generators which will not even work half the time because of "night" and "poor weather", which are hilariously energy-expensive to produce in the first place, and which will break after 40 years.
gollark: I mean, in a sense, maybe it is.

See also

References
  1. "A Perl toolbox for regression tests : Testing Tools". Nnc3.com. Retrieved 27 October 2017.
  2. Schilli, Mike. "Print as Print Can » Linux Magazine". Linux Magazine. Retrieved 27 October 2017.
  3. Szabo, Gabor. "TAP - Test Anything Protocol". Perl Maven. Retrieved 2019-08-07.
  4. "The Test Anything Protocol website". Testanything.org. Retrieved September 4, 2008.
  5. McClive, Simon (2017-09-21). "Unit testing Postgres with pgTAP". Medium (website). Retrieved 2019-08-07.
  6. Gravelle, Rob (2012-08-13). "Testing Your MySQL Stored Procedures with MyTAP". Database Journal. Retrieved 2019-08-07.
  7. "Node Tap". Node Tap. Retrieved 2019-08-07.
  8. "TAP(3) manual page". FreeBSD. Retrieved 2019-08-07.
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