Can anyone tell me why this isn't working?
>>> import mock
>>> @mock.patch('datetime.date.today')
... def today(cls):
... return date(2010, 1, 1)
...
>>> from datetime import date
>>> date.today()
datetime.date(2010, 12, 19)
Perhaps someone could suggest a better way?
There are a few problems.
First of all, the way you're using mock.patch
isn't quite right. When used as a decorator, it replaces the given function/class (in this case, datetime.date.today
) with a Mock
object only within the decorated function. So, only within your today()
will datetime.date.today
be a different function, which doesn't appear to be what you want.
What you really want seems to be more like this:
@mock.patch('datetime.date.today')
def test():
datetime.date.today.return_value = date(2010, 1, 1)
print datetime.date.today()
Unfortunately, this won't work:
>>> test()
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
File "build/bdist.macosx-10.6-universal/egg/mock.py", line 557, in patched
File "build/bdist.macosx-10.6-universal/egg/mock.py", line 620, in __enter__
TypeError: can't set attributes of built-in/extension type 'datetime.date'
This fails because Python built-in types are immutable - see this answer for more details.
In this case, I would subclass datetime.date myself and create the right function:
import datetime
class NewDate(datetime.date):
@classmethod
def today(cls):
return cls(2010, 1, 1)
datetime.date = NewDate
And now you could do:
>>> datetime.date.today()
NewDate(2010, 1, 1)