gh-99151: Improve performance and error readability of unittest.TestCase.assertDictEqual

[merlinz01]

The function previously used a simple difflib.ndiff on top of a pprint.pformat of each dict, which resulted in very bad performance on large dicts and unclear assertion error outputs in many cases. This change formats the diffs in a more readable manner by inspecting the differences between the dicts, truncating long keys and values, and justifying values in the various groups of lines.

• Issue: Calling unittest.assertDictEqual for medium-size dictionaries takes too long #99151

[ghost]

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[Eclips4]

Can you please provide benchmarks testing the old and new approaches?

[merlinz01]

Comparing two dicts with 10000 keys and values of 20 random bytes each.

class TestDictCompare(unittest.TestCase):
    def test_compare_dicts(self):
        first = self.generate_dict()
        second = self.generate_dict()
        self.assertDictEqual(first, second)

    def generate_dict(self):
        length = 10000
        d = {}
        for _ in range(length):
            d[random.randbytes(20)] = random.randbytes(20)
        return d

The previous implementation takes 15.3 seconds:

F
======================================================================
FAIL: test_compare_dicts (__main__.TestDictCompare.test_compare_dicts)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/home/merlin/Projects/cpython/test_new_format.py", line 36, in test_compare_dicts
    self.assertDictEqual(
    ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~^
        first, second
        ^^^^^^^^^^^^^
    )
    ^
AssertionError: {b'\xbeA\r\xf3~L?\xa5\xf4\x97"\x94\x1f\x98T\xe[1244908 chars]xf0'} != {b'\x01\xfaz\x02r\xec\xe1\xdf\xba8\r\xdc\xd9\x[1247916 chars]x04'}
Diff is 12985674 characters long. Set self.maxDiff to None to see it.

----------------------------------------------------------------------
Ran 1 test in 15.300s

FAILED (failures=1)

The new implementation takes 0.28 seconds:

F
======================================================================
FAIL: test_compare_dicts (__main__.TestDictCompare.test_compare_dicts)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/home/merlin/Projects/cpython/test_new_format.py", line 36, in test_compare_dicts
    self.assertDictEqual(
    ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~^
        first, second
        ^^^^^^^^^^^^^
    )
    ^
AssertionError: {b'_\x94|^\xb9e\x98\x86\xdeUd\xf3\x7f\xc5\x9[1246065 chars]x80'} != {b'\x16_W\xea}\xf1 \xaa`=\x06\xf2\xf4#\xe5\x[1247665 chars]xe7'}
Diff is 2197425 characters long. Set self.maxDiff to None to see it.

----------------------------------------------------------------------
Ran 1 test in 0.277s

FAILED (failures=1)

[merlinz01]

For the test in the linked issue, I'm getting 6.6 seconds with the old vs. 0.22 seconds with the new.

[merlinz01]

An example of the new output:

{
    'eighteighteight': 'eight',
    'four'           : 4,
Keys in both dicts with differing values:
  - 'oneoneoneone': 1,
  + 'oneoneoneone': 2,
  - 'six': 6,
  + 'six': 'six',
Keys in the first dict but not the second:
  - 'seven': 'averyveryveryveryveryveryveryveryv[44 chars]alue',
  - 'two'  : 2,
Keys in the second dict but not the first:
  + 'averyveryveryveryveryveryveryveryl[22 chars]gkey': {'oneoneoneone': 1, 'two': 2, 'four[133 chars]ght'},
  + 'five'                                            : 5,
  + 'three'                                           : 3,
} : Hey, you passed dicts that were not equal!

(edited to reflect changes in fcfdd92)

[tomasr8]

Thanks! That's a pretty nice speedup! I'm just wondering, do we want to show the Keys in both dicts with identical values? If they're identical, maybe we can just omit them form the diff output?

[merlinz01]

I'll remove the explanation line for identical keys and values.

The old implementation doesn't omit anything, so if we omit values I think there should be some indication that there are more values than what is shown, rather than silently dropping them.
E.g.

{
(omitted 590 matching key-value pairs)
Keys in both dicts with differing values:
  ...

[tomasr8]

Now that the diffing is more complex, I think it needs more tests to cover the possible outputs :)

[github-actions]

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