How can you test that two dictionaries are equal with pytest in python

Question

Trying to assert that two dictionaries that have nested contents are equal to each other (order doesn't matter) with pytest. What's the pythonic way to do this?

Solution 1

Don't spend your time writing this logic yourself. Just use the functions provided by the default testing library unittest

from unittest import TestCase
TestCase().assertDictEqual(expected_dict, actual_dict)

Solution 2

pytest's magic is clever enough. By writing

assert {'a': 1} == {'a': 1}

you will have a nested test on equality.

Solution 3

I guess a simple assert equality test should be okay:

>>> d1 = {n: chr(n+65) for n in range(10)}
>>> d2 = {n: chr(n+65) for n in range(10)}
>>> d1 == d2
True
>>> l1 = [1, 2, 3]
>>> l2 = [1, 2, 3]
>>> d2[10] = l2
>>> d1[10] = l1
>>> d1 == d2
True
>>> class Example:
    stub_prop = None
>>> e1 = Example()
>>> e2 = Example()
>>> e2.stub_prop = 10
>>> e1.stub_prop = 'a'
>>> d1[11] = e1
>>> d2[11] = e2
>>> d1 == d2
False

Solution 4

General purpose way is to:

import json

# Make sure you sort any lists in the dictionary before dumping to a string

dictA_str = json.dumps(dictA, sort_keys=True)
dictB_str = json.dumps(dictB, sort_keys=True)

assert dictA_str == dictB_str

View more solutions