How to match sub pattern in Robot Framework? - regex

Question

I am doing following things in RFW:
STEP 1 : I need to match the "NUM_FLOWS" value from the following command output.
STEP 2 : If its "Zero - 0" , Testcase should FAIL. If its NON-ZERO, Test case is PASS.
Sample command output:
router-7F2C13#show app stats gmail on TEST/switch1234-15E8CC
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
APPLICATION BYTES_IN BYTES_OUT NUM_FLOWS
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
gmail 0 0 4
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
router-7F2C13#
How to do this with "Should Match Regexp" and "Should Match" keywords? How to check only that number sub-pattern? (Example: In the above command output, NUM_FLOWS is NON-ZERO, Then testcase should PASS.)
Please help me to achieve this.
Thanks in advance.
My New robot file content:
Write show dpi app stats BitTorrent_encrypted on AVC/ap7532-15E8CC
${raw_text} Read Until Regexp .*#
${data[0].num_flows} 0
| | ${data}= | parse output | ${raw_text}
| | Should not be equal as integers | ${data[0].num_flows} | 0
| | ... | Excepted num_flows to be non-zero but it was zero | values=False

Answer 1

There are many ways to solve this. A simple way is to use robot's regular expression keywords to look for "gmail" at the start of a line, and then expect three numbers and then the number 0 (zero) followed by the end of the line. This assumes that a) NUM_FLOWS is always the last column, and b) there is only one line that begins with "gmail". I don't know if those are valid assumptions or not.
Because the data spans multiple lines, the pattern includes (?m) (the multiline flag) so that $ means "end of line" in addition to "end of string".
| | Should not match regexp | ${data} | (?m)\\s+gmail\\s+\\d+\\s+\\d+\\s+0\\s*$
| | ... | Expected non-zero value in the fourth column for gmail, but it was zero.
There are plenty of other ways to solve the problem. For example, if you need to check for other values in other columns, you might want to write a python keyword that parses the data and returns some sort of data structure.
Here's a quick example. It's not bulletproof, and makes some assumptions about the data passed in. I wouldn't use it in production, but it illustrates the technique. The keyword returns a list of items, and each item is a custom object with four attributes: name, bytes_in, bytes_our and num_flows:
# python library
import re
def parse_output(data):
class Data(object):
def __init__(self, raw_text):
columns = re.split(r'\s*', raw_text.strip())
self.name = columns[0]
self.bytes_in = int(columns[1])
self.bytes_out = int(columns[2])
self.num_flows = int(columns[3])
lines = data.split("\n")
result = []
# skip first four lines and the last two
for line in lines[4:-3]:
result.append(Data(line))
return result
Using it in a test:
*** Test Cases ***
| | # <put your code here to get the data from the >
| | # <router and store it in ${raw_text} >
| | ${raw_text}= | ...
| | ${data}= | parse output | ${raw_text}
| | Should not be equal as integers | ${data[0].num_flows} | 0
| | ... | Excepted num_flows to be non-zero but it was zero | values=False