This post was originally published on 2019-10-17

Overview

The first thing I always try to do to learn a new language after writing “hello world” is implementing fizzbuzz. This wasn’t true with the Robot Framework, so I thought I would be time to give it a try.

My Implementation

 *** Settings ***
 Documentation    Fizzbuzz kata
 Library    BuiltIn

 *** Test Cases ***

 Print Fizzbuzz
     [Documentation]    Print the numbers 1-100 in the log.html file, replacing
     ...                all numbers that are divisible by 3 with "fizz", 5 with
     ...                "buzz", and if divisible by both "fizzbuzz".

     Fizzbuzz

 *** Keywords ***

 Fizzbuzz
     FOR    ${number}    IN RANGE    1    101
         ${divisible_by_3}=    Is Mod Zero    ${number}    3
         ${divisible_by_5}=    Is Mod Zero    ${number}    5
         ${divisible_by_15}=   Is Mod Zero    ${number}   15
         Run keyword if    ${divisible_by_15}    Log to Console    FIZZBUZZ
         ...    ELSE IF    ${divisible_by_3}     Log to Console    FIZZ
         ...    ELSE IF    ${divisible_by_5}     Log to Console    BUZZ
         ...    ELSE    Log to Console    ${number}
     END

 Is Mod Zero
     [Documentation]    Returns whether the modulus of two numbers is zero.
     [Arguments]        ${dividend}    ${divisor}
     [Return]           ${is_modulus_zero}
     # Go-go gadget Python!
     ${is_modulus_zero}=    Evaluate    divmod(${dividend},${divisor})[1] == 0

Observations

The first thing I learned from this exercise was how surprisingly difficult it was to evaluate the result of an expression. If I was running this in Python I would do something like this:

for num in range(1, 101):
    if num % 15 == 0:
        print("fizzbuzz")
    elif num % 3 == 0:
        print("fizz")
    elif num % 5 == 0:
        print("buzz")
    else:
        print(num)

I can evaluate the num % 3 part within the else statement using Python. But here’s what I can’t do using the Robot Framework:

Run keyword if    Is Mod Zero    ${number}    15   Log to Console    FIZZBUZZ
...    ELSE IF    Run keyword and return status    Is Mod Zero    ${number}    3     Log to Console    FIZZ

I’m sure something like this is possible without creating a temporary variable (and evaluating the Is Mod Zero 3 times every time) but I’m not quite sure what it is.

The second thing I learned was how easy it was to run a Python one-liner from Robot. If that didn’t work then I simply didn’t see how I was going to evaluate a modulus from Robot without writing a Python module (for a one-liner).

Tags: #robotframework, #programming