This vignette will teach you how to create a unit test shell for all of the examples in a single .R file’s documentation.

Setup

First, let’s set up a dummy package called tempkg with just the detect.R and match.R files from the source code of the stringr package.

usethis::create_package("tempkg", open = FALSE)
#>  Creating tempkg/.
#>  Setting active project to
#>   "/private/var/folders/0g/hj_q_pzx65bbjnslxz9n0src0000gn/T/RtmpI4Mfpz/tempkg".
#>  Creating R/.
#>  Writing DESCRIPTION.
#>  Writing NAMESPACE.
#>  Setting active project to "<no active project>".
fs::file_copy(
  system.file("extdata", c("detect.R", "match.R"), package = "exampletestr"),
  "tempkg/R/"
)

Now let’s move into the tempkg directory:

setwd("tempkg/")

and set the active project:

usethis::proj_set(".")
#>  Setting active project to
#>   "/private/var/folders/0g/hj_q_pzx65bbjnslxz9n0src0000gn/T/RtmpI4Mfpz/tempkg".

Main event

The detect.R file looks like this (well, I’ve abbreviated it slightly):

#' Detect the presence or absence of a pattern in a string.
#'
#' Vectorised over `string` and `pattern`.
#'
#' @param string Input vector. Either a character vector, or something
#'  coercible to one.
#' @param pattern Pattern to look for.
#'
#' @return A logical vector.
#'
#' @export
#' @examples
#' fruit <- c("apple", "banana", "pear", "pinapple")
#' str_detect(fruit, "a")
#' str_detect(fruit, "^a")
#' str_detect(fruit, "a$")
#' str_detect(fruit, "b")
#' str_detect(fruit, "[aeiou]")
str_detect <- function(string, pattern) {
  switch(type(pattern),
    empty = ,
    bound = str_count(string, pattern) > 0,
    fixed = stri_detect_fixed(string, pattern, opts_fixed = opts(pattern)),
    coll = stri_detect_coll(string, pattern,
      opts_collator = opts(pattern)
    ),
    regex = stri_detect_regex(string, pattern, opts_regex = opts(pattern))
  )
}

We can make the unit tests shell file for the str_match() function using make_tests_shells_file():

make_tests_shells_file("detect", open = FALSE)

This outputs a test-detect.R file in the tests/testthat folder with contents

test_that("`str_detect()` works", {
  fruit <- c("apple", "banana", "pear", "pinapple")
  expect_equal(str_detect(fruit, "a"), )
  expect_equal(str_detect(fruit, "^a"), )
  expect_equal(str_detect(fruit, "a$"), )
  expect_equal(str_detect(fruit, "b"), )
  expect_equal(str_detect(fruit, "[aeiou]"), )
  expect_equal(str_detect("aecfg", letters), )
})

which can be sensibly completed as

test_that("`str_detect()` works", {
  fruit <- c("apple", "banana", "pear", "pinapple")
  expect_equal(str_detect(fruit, "a"), rep(TRUE, 4))
  expect_equal(str_detect(fruit, "^a"), c(TRUE, rep(FALSE, 3)))
  expect_equal(str_detect(fruit, "a$"), c(FALSE, TRUE, FALSE, FALSE))
  expect_equal(str_detect(fruit, "b"), c(FALSE, TRUE, FALSE, FALSE))
  expect_equal(str_detect(fruit, "[aeiou]"), rep(TRUE, 4))
  expect_equal(
    str_detect("aecfg", letters),
    letters %in% c("a", "c", "e", "f", "g")
  )
})
#> Test passed 🥇

Cleanup

knitr::opts_knit$set(root.dir = tempdir(check = TRUE))
if (fs::dir_exists("tempkg")) fs::dir_delete("tempkg")
knitr::opts_knit$set(root.dir = init_wd)