How to make Robot Framework functions accept arguments as strings instead of the default unicode type

Question

I am writing a new RF library which are expected to take string arguments because the (pre-existing) Python library that I use is expecting strings, not unicode. Ofcourse I can convert each unicode to string before calling my existing function which supports only strings.

import ConfigParser

class RFConfigParser:

def get (self,section, option):
    print type (section) #prints unicode
    section = str (section) #works but I dont want to do this
    return self._config.get (section, option) #this pre-existing function expect a string input

The problem is I have lots of similar functions and in each of these functions I will have to call this unicode to string conversion circus.

Is there a straight forward way of doing this, so that the RF function will directly accept in string format

Another question is the default unicode support a Robot Framework feature or a RIDE feature ? (I am using RIDE, is that why I am getting this problem)

Answer 1

You can cast those Unicode strings to normal strings using Evaluate keyword before you pass them to your library.

Something like this:

lib.py:

def foo(foo):
    print type(foo)

test.txt

*** Settings ***
Library           lib.py

*** Test Cases ***
demo
    ${bar}    Evaluate    str('bar')
    foo    ${bar}

What the best solution is depends on the exact situation. Maybe one solution is to write a keyword that does that casting for you and then calls the library function. Maybe the best option still is to just modify your library to accept Unicode strings. It depends.