Parser tests

Parser Tests

This page documents the unit-test format(s) being used for implementations of the HTML5 parsing spec. The aim is to produce implementation-independent, self-describing tests that can be shared between any groups working on these technologies.

Tokenizer Tests

The test format is json. This has the advantage that the syntax is extensible and the disadvantage that it is relatively verbose.

Basic Structure

{"tests":
[

{"description":"Test description",
"input":"input_string",
"output":[expected_output_tokens]}
]

}

input_string is a string literal containing the input string to pass to the tokenizer expected_output_tokens is a list of tokens, ordered with the first produced by the tokenizer the first (leftmost) in the list. The list must mach the complete list of tokens that the tokenizer should produce. Valid tokens are:

["DOCTYPE", name, error?]
["StartTag", name, {attributes}])
["EndTag", name]
["Comment", data]
["Character", data]
"ParseError"
"AtheistParseError"

Multiple tests per file are allowed simply by adding more objects to the "tests" list.

Open Issues

• Is the format too verbose
• Do we want to allow the starting content model flag of the tokenizer to be specified (e.g. through a "contentModel" field in the test objects
• Do we want to allow the test to pass if only a subset of the actual tokens emitted matches the expected_output_tokens list.
• Do we want an "AtheistParseError"