Data Types and User-defined Types

The following sections describe in more detail how user-defined data types are used in behave. The type converter functionality, that is described here, is only supported by the:

• “parse” matcher (based on: parse module)

• “cfparse” matcher (based on: parse-type module)

---

Contents:

• Type Definition Basics
• Predefined Data Types in parse
• Cardinality: Zero or One (Optional)
• Cardinality: One or More (List of Type)
• Cardinality: Zero or More (List of Type)
• Choice (Word/String Alternatives)
• Choice2 (Word/String Alternatives)
• Enumeration (String-to-Value Mapping)
• More Complex Data Types

Important

Part of the functionality, that is described here, is based on parse-type, an extension of the excellent parse module.

The parse module is the inverse of Python string.format function. The parse-type module extends it to simplify the generation of types (actually type converter functions for types).

parse features:

• Optional pattern attribute (for regex) in user-defined type converters.

• The with_pattern() decorator for type-converters.

parse-type features:

• Simplifies the creation of type converters for some common cases

• Creates type converter variants based on cardinality

• parse_type extensions (TypeBuilder functionality).

• Provides an extended parser with cardinality field support. A cardinality field is a type suffix in parse expression, like:

  Cardinality	Example	Description
  0..1	“{person:Person?}”	Zero or one: For optional parts.
  0..*	“{persons:Person*}”	Zero or more: For list<T> (many0).
  1..*	“{persons:Person+}”	One or more: For list<T> (many).