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Comment by ilyanep | Hacker News Reader

In case anyone is wondering, that code should read something like:

  void testFooBarException() {
    try {
      thisShouldThrowFooBarException()
      fail() // Should have thrown exception
    } catch (FooBarException ignored) {}
  }

If you're feeling super fancy, you can even do some asserts in the catch block to make sure the FooBarException has an expected exception message.

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I'm glad I work in a language where this is

  assertRaises(FooBarException, thisShouldThrowFooBarException)

Impossible to mistype, and states exactly what should happen.

First thing to do when working with the former is to write some code that will allow you to write the latter.

With Junit, just write

  @Test(expected = FooBarException.class)
  void testFooBarException() {
      thisShouldThrowFooBarException()
  }

PHPUnit has this in the comment annotations

    /**
     * Tests that thisShouldThrowFooBarException throws FooBarException
     *
     *  @expectedException FooBarException
     */
    public function testFooBarException() {
      thisShouldThrowFooBarException();
    }

but I much prefer

    /**
     * Tests that thisShouldThrowFooBarException throws FooBarException
     */
    public function testFooBarException() {
      $this->setExpectedException('FooBarException');
      thisShouldThrowFooBarException();
    }

Much more explicit and you're less likely to miss it when trying to grok someone else's unittest.

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