Almost manually testing add()


In the first examples we recreate a path similar to what we took in the Perl introduction so you might skip it or just flip through the pages.

Let's assume we have a simple PHP library with a bunch of functions. It is located in our includes directory in the mylib.php file. It is used by a "web application" called basic_calc.php that provides a - surprise - calculator for the web visitor.

In order to test this we create a separate PHP script that will require the relevant library and call the add() function supplying various arguments and displaying the results.

Then we eyeball those results to see if they are what they should be.


examples/php/intro/t01.php
<?php

require_once(dirname(__FILE__) . '/../includes/mylib.php');

print add(1,1) . '<br>';
print add(2,2) . '<br>';
print add(1,1,1) . '<br>';

?>

Result:


2
4
2

Not much of an output but if we are careful we'll see that the third line is incorrect. The problem is that it is a lot of effort to check if the results are correct.

dirname(__FILE__) just gives the path to the directory of currently executing file and we know the library we are testing is relative to it.