use Perl

One of the features I'm working on for TAPx::Parser is the ability to test anything. Admittedly, this is a big attempt, but here's what I'm thinking. Imagine the following program:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use Test::HTML::Lint tests => 1;

my $file = shift;
open my $fh, '<', $file
  or die "Cannot open ($file) for reading: $!";
my $html = do { local $/; <$fh> };

html_ok( $html, "$file has valid HTML" );

Now that looks weird. Why would I want arguments to a test script? Well, name it test_html and you can do this ('extension' is deliberately misnamed):

runtests --recurse --exec 'test_hml %s' --xtension 'html?' www/

You've now turned all HTML files in your www/ directory into tests!

--exec is expected to take a sprintf format which will be opened with this:

my $fh      = gensym;
my $command = sprintf $exec, $arg;
if ( open $fh, "$command |" ) {
    return TAPx::Parser::Iterator->new($fh);
}
else {
    ...
}

So long as whatever you pass into --exec outputs TAP, you can test anything you want. In fact, it doesn't even have to be filenames. You could pass a list of urls to runtests and have your testing utility fetch them and run tests on them.

What I'm trying to figure out is how to easily handle a test suite with test programs written in Perl, C, etc. My current plans only allow one type of --exec at a time. Thoughts?

Update: I might just make the %s optional in the format and tack it on to the end if it's not in the string. I'd also disallow any other % sign in the format since that would screw up the sprintf.