Python/Doctest - doctesting complex strings

Question

I'm a student working on an assignment where I'm supposed to doctest all internal functions. My functions use complex strings and return complex strings as well, so I have no idea how to do it. For example my function "ProcessImports()" can take the string:

%@import
blahblah
%@

And return:

\begin{shadedquoteBlueBar}
\fontsize{9pt}{9pt}
\begin{Verbatim}
blahblah}
\end{Verbatim}
\end{shadedquoteBlueBar}
\noindent

How would I go around doctesting this? I've not seen any examples of using doctest that don't return classes/structs or numbers or other simple representations ("\n" doesn't seem to work, for example).

Here's the function ProcessImports(): http://pastebin.com/3JjnyKjK

Any help would be appreciated!

Edit: might wanna ignore the attempted doctest at the top. That's just me trying to mess around to find out if I can make it work and failing horribly at it.

Answer 1

The following example shows one successful approach; bear in mind that the doctest just needs to "look like" an interpreter session:

from textwrap import dedent

def function(s):
    """Testing doctests.

    >>> print function('''%@import
    ... blahblah
    ... %@''')
    <BLANKLINE>
    \\begin{shadedquoteBlueBar}
    \\fontsize{9pt}{9pt}
    \\begin{Verbatim}
    blahblah}
    \\end{Verbatim}
    \\end{shadedquoteBlueBar}
    \\noindent

    """
    s = dedent(r"""
               \begin{shadedquoteBlueBar}
               \fontsize{9pt}{9pt}
               \begin{Verbatim}
               blahblah}
               \end{Verbatim}
               \end{shadedquoteBlueBar}
               \noindent""")
    return s

Note the continuation characters ... on the input to the function within the docstring.