jstest

Console output

If you’re writing a custom reporter, there’s a good chance you’ll want to print output to the console, whether that’s the browser’s developer console or the stdout stream of a server-side process. In order to make sure text-based reporters work on every supported platform, jstest includes an API for writing to the console, no matter what environment your tests are running on. If you use this API, your reporter will work on any platform that jstest supports.

The console API is found on an object called JS.Console in the browser, or require('jstest').Console on CommonJS platforms. It provides several sets of methods for performing various tasks.

Text output

• Console.puts(string) writes a string to the console, followed by a newline. This will use the developer console in web browsers, the runtime.trace() method on Adobe AIR, or the stdout stream on sever-side platforms.
• Console.print(string) writes the given string to the console, without a trailing newline if the platform supports this. If not, the output is buffered and will be flushed on the next puts() call.

Text formatting

The Console object supports the following methods for formatting text output. Each method adds the named format to the current state, and all text printed after calling the command will have that format applied.

In environments that do not support color formatting, these commands are silently ignored.

• reset() resets all formatting attributes
• bold(), normal() set the weight of the text
• italic(), noitalic() switch between italic and roman text
• underline(), noline() apply and remove underlining
• blink(), noblink() apply and remove blinking text
• black(), red(), green(), yellow(), blue(), magenta(), cyan(), white(), nocolor() set the current text color
• Color methods can be prefixed with bg, for example bgyellow(), to set the current background color

Cursor motion

The following methods can be used in some environments to move the cursor within the terminal window.

• cursorUp(n), cursorDown(n), cursorForward(n), cursorBack(n) move the cursor n places in the given direction
• cursorNextLine(n), cursorPrevLine(n) move the cursor by n lines
• cursorColumn(x) moves the cursor to column x
• cursorPosition(x,y) moves the cursor to column x, row y
• cursorHide(), cursorShow() hides and shows the cursor
• eraseScreen() clears the entire terminal screen
• eraseScreenForward(), eraseScreenBack() clears everything either after or before the cursor position
• eraseLine() clears the whole of the current line
• eraseLineForward(), eraseLineBack() clears the current line either to the right or the left of the cursor

Exit status

On platforms that allow scripts to exit the current process, this command will end the process with the given status number:

Console.exit(status)

The status parameter is optional and defaults to 0.

Environment variables

The Console object also provides a uniform interface for accessing environment variables on all supported platforms. To read an environment variable, use this method:

// Returns the value of the FORMAT environment variable
var format = Console.envvar('FORMAT');