How to test whether evaluating an expression produces no output at all?

General Usage
1
  • @test_logs tests for log output
  • @test_nowarn tests that stdout is empty (and, despite the name, isn’t meant strictly for the @warn macro)

How to test whether stdout is empty as well? How to test whether an expression didn’t output anything (log messages or anything else) to stderr and stdout?

I tried to redirect stdout and stderr to IOBuffers, but it didn’t work.

1 Like
2

Could you post a simple code example showing what you have tried?

3

The last link in my post is a link to the example, but here it is again. I tried to redirect_stdio to some IOBuffers:

buf_stdout, buf_stderr = IOBuffer(), IOBuffer()
redirect_stdio(stdout=buf_stdout, stderr=buf_stderr, stdin=devnull) do
    @info "Hello!"
end

I then planned to test whether length(take!(buf_stdout)) == 0 (and similarly for buf_stderr).

However, it produced this error:

MethodError: no method matching (::Base.RedirectStdStream)(::IOBuffer)
4

Yes, it looks like you have hit an issue that has been around for a long time.

The only solution I can think of is to redirect to a temporary file or a socket, but of course that is not very elegant and I could imagine that you have seen that solution already. The other solution would be to make a pull request fixing this in the next release of Julia :grimacing: