Use seed() in tests?

[krsriq]

I'd like to increase the Provider test coverage a bit. To do so I checked out the existing tests and saw different approaches taken:

some tests use seed() to ensure a certain result is returned, e.g.

Faker/test/Faker/Provider/uk_UA/PersonTest.php

Lines 11 to 18 in 907b307

	public function testFirstNameMaleReturns()
	{
	$faker = new Generator();
	$faker->addProvider(new Person($faker));
	$faker->seed(1);
	$this->assertEquals('Максим', $faker->firstNameMale());
	}

other tests just check that a non-empty result is returned, e.g.

Faker/test/Faker/Provider/bn_BD/PersonTest.php

Lines 18 to 22 in 907b307

	public function testIfFirstNameMaleCanReturnData()
	{
	$firstNameMale = $this->faker->firstNameMale();
	$this->assertNotEmpty($firstNameMale);
	}

Another approach would be to test that we're dealing with a valid string (in the case of firstNameMale()) or via regex a valid pattern.

Is there another solution I have overlooked/any other ideas? Which solution do you prefer?

[IonBazan]

Good point - I've noticed some inconsistency there too. What do you think about putting it in setUp() method in \Faker\Test\TestCase and making sure all tests are extending this class? That would reduce code duplication for:

$this->faker = new Generator();
$this->faker->seed(1);

While we are here, we could replace the second argument for mt_srand to MT_RAND_MT19937 as we already require PHP 7.1 so no need to keep the compatibility with previous versions:

Faker/src/Faker/Generator.php

Lines 217 to 224 in 6366793

	public function seed($seed = null)
	{
	if ($seed === null) {
	mt_srand();
	} else {
	mt_srand((int) $seed, MT_RAND_PHP);
	}
	}

But that would be a breaking change.

[pimjansen]

Agree on the default seed set in the setup. The MTRand for now is fine. Lets bump that in 2.x

[krsriq]

The downside of seeding the random number generator for all tests would of course be that our tests would miss cases that only occur sometimes/randomly.

[pimjansen]

Closing this since we updated the seeding used in setup. If changes are still required feel free to raise a pr fornthis