Is slash / a reliable character to indicate a fixture union alternative test id in pytest-cases

[smarie]

Dear pytest maintainers, in pytest-cases as you know I extend the "cross-product" parametrization engine of pytest so that it becomes a tree of independent cross-products, each path in the tree being a combination of fixture alternatives and having its own fixture closure. (see more detailed explanation here)

I recently was challenged by users to simplify the generated test ids. I think that I found a reasonably elegant solution. It relies on a special character indicating that a given parameterset is a fixture alternative. For now I use special character /, as I find it intuitive to indicate that this goes into a sub-branch of the fixture closure tree.

However I just noticed that this character is transformed by pytest into a backslash \ for display. Is this the only side-effect or is there any other I should know about ?

Thanks a lot for your feedback !

[RonnyPfannschmidt]

Off hand I'd think it's just path display bug, i intend to turn test ids into a more complex object soonish

[smarie]

Thanks @RonnyPfannschmidt . Ok, then I'll release version 2.8.0 with this character, and if this becomes a forbidden character let me know! Of course if the display can be fixed in the future that can be even better, but this is non-blocking for me. The only side-effet of current behaviour for users of pytest-harvest or similar plugin is that they see / in the list of collected the test results, but see \ in the console display and IDE (PyCharm, etc.). Not a big deal I guess.

[Zac-HD]

Closing as answered 👍