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The doctest doesn't work good, if a function returns a dict.
Here a simple example:
def test(d):
 """
 This works:
 >>> test({"A":1, "B":2, "C":3})
 {'A': 1, 'C': 3, 'B': 2}
 
 This failed, because of different dict sort:
 >>> test({"A":1, "B":2, "C":3})
 {'A': 1, 'B': 2, 'C': 3}
 
 The Error messages:
 Failed example:
 test({"A":1, "B":2, "C":3})
 Expected:
 {'A': 1, 'B': 2, 'C': 3}
 Got:
 {'A': 1, 'C': 3, 'B': 2}
 """
 return d
The problem is IMHO that doctest.py [1] OutputChecker.check_output()
does compare the repr() of the dict and not the real dict as data.
One solution: Use eval() to convert the string repr. of the dict into
the real dict:
...
 #-----<add>-----
 try:
 if eval(got) == eval(want):
 return True
 except:
 pass #*pfeif* kein schoener stil, aber pragmatisch
 #-----</add>----
 # We didn't find any match; return false.
 return False
German discuss can be found here:
http://www.python-forum.de/topic-15321.html
[1] http://svn.python.org/view/python/trunk/Lib/doctest.py?view=markup