TestResponse

The response object is based on webob.response.Response with some additions to help with testing.

The inherited attributes that are most interesting:

response.status:
The text status of the response, e.g., "200 OK".
response.status_int:
The text status_int of the response, e.g., 200.
response.headers:
A dictionary-like object of the headers in the response.
response.body:
The text body of the response.
response.text:
The unicode text body of the response.
response.normal_body:
The whitespace-normalized [1] body of the response.
response.request:
The webob.request.BaseRequest object used to generate this response.

The added methods:

response.follow(**kw):
Follows the redirect, returning the new response. It is an error if this response wasn’t a redirect. All keyword arguments are passed to webtest.TestApp (e.g., status). Returns another response object.
response.maybe_follow(**kw):
Follows all redirects; does nothing if this response is not a redirect. All keyword arguments are passed to webtest.TestApp (e.g., status). Returns another response object.
x in response:
Returns True if the string is found in the response body. Whitespace is normalized for this test.
response.mustcontain(string1, string2, no=string3):
Raises an error if any of the strings are not found in the response. If a string of a string list is given as no keyword argument, raise an error if one of those are found in the response. It also prints out the response in that case, so you can see the real response.
response.showbrowser():
Opens the HTML response in a browser; useful for debugging.
str(response):
Gives a slightly-compacted version of the response. This is compacted to remove newlines, making it easier to use with doctest
response.click(description=None, linkid=None, href=None, anchor=None, index=None, verbose=False):
Clicks the described link (see click)
response.forms:
Return a dictionary of forms; you can use both indexes (refer to the forms in order) or the string ids of forms (if you’ve given them ids) to identify the form. See Form handling for more on the form objects.
response.form:
If there is just a single form, this returns that. It is an error if you use this and there are multiple forms.

Footnotes

[1]The whitespace normalization replace sequences of whitespace characters and \n \r \t by a single space.

Parsing the Body

There are several ways to get parsed versions of the response. These are the attributes:

response.html:

Return a BeautifulSoup version of the response body:

>>> res = app.get('/index.html')
>>> res.html
<html><body><div id="content">hey!</div></body></html>
>>> res.html.__class__
<class '...BeautifulSoup'>
response.xml:

Return an ElementTree version of the response body:

>>> res = app.get('/document.xml')
>>> res.xml
<Element 'xml' ...>
>>> res.xml[0].tag
'message'
>>> res.xml[0].text
'hey!'
response.lxml:

Return an lxml version of the response body:

>>> res = app.get('/index.html')
>>> res.lxml
<Element html at ...>
>>> res.lxml.xpath('//body/div')[0].text
'hey!'

>>> res = app.get('/document.xml')
>>> res.lxml
<Element xml at ...>
>>> res.lxml[0].tag
'message'
>>> res.lxml[0].text
'hey!'
response.pyquery:

Return an PyQuery version of the response body:

>>> res.pyquery('message')
[<message>]
>>> res.pyquery('message').text()
'hey!'
response.json:

Return the parsed JSON (parsed with simplejson):

>>> res = app.get('/object.json')
>>> sorted(res.json.values())
[1, 2]

In each case the content-type must be correct or an AttributeError is raised. If you do not have the necessary library installed (none of them are required by WebTest), you will get an ImportError.