Show HN: Forbidden Fruit – Patch built-in Python objects

That's the idea. Everything to make testing easier! :)

I don't think that there's any implications for that, but I'll probably relicense this library as MIT or at least LGPL pretty soon.

I just used my default licence template, which defaults to GPL.

I might be wrong, but I don't think that it's actually possible to mock built-in objects (written in C, not in python) using pytest.

A very quick test would be trying to do something like this:

>>> monkeypatch(str, "blah", "bleh") >>> assert str.blah == "bleh"

I tried it here with no success though.

I have two main use cases in my mind right now.

1) Making it easier to write tools for testing python code, like sure[0] and freezegun[1]

2) Prototyping new features for python without touching the C code.

[0] http://github.com/gabrielfalcao/sure -- where forbiddenfruit started) [1] http://github.com/spulec/freezegun

It's a dirty hack - therefore, fun.

Probably for the same reason why reopening Ruby classes is used so much. "hello, world".capitalize looks nicer than capitalize("hello, world"), and it's more convenient for method chaining.