I’ve been doing a lot of Ruby on Rails Cucumber testing, and was inspired by the simplicity of controlling the flow of executing by matching on regular expressions.

The idea behind cucumber is you write English steps and assertions to test a web app. Plain English means just that: no “tell box 1 of window 1” almost-english-but-not-quite, and not nerd English like Rails makes popular “1.days”.

Plain English.

Here’s a (slightly modified) example from something I’ve been working on:

Given a logged in, registered user And I have a blog post that I can edit Then I should see "Edit"

This all happens by the parser matching those phrases with a bunch of regular expression code blocks elsewhere in the app, then executing one if one matches. Which is brilliant in its simplicity.

So I wrote this same kind of engine in Python. Just a generic regex matches calling functions, suitable for any purpose (not just test driven development like Cucumber).

I put it on on GitHub. Find it at PyMethodMatch’s home on GitHub