GTAC 2010: Flexible Design? Testable Design? You Don't Have To Choose!

Another good talk on testable design, from the Google Test Automation Conference 2010.

wide character text file conversion

My LG Neon phone has a feature where it will save all the text messages as a text file on the memory card, however this is not a nice UTF-8 text file, rater one that is almost UTF-16 with reversed byte order, which confuses the local text editors on my Mac.

Upon investigation of the raw text file I found that the format follows

0xff 0xfe ( char 0x00 )*

where the data I want is the char bytes.

Following this state machine


I wrote a small state machine perl script to convert the file

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;

my $char;

sub unexpected;
sub read_header_2;

sub read_header_1 {
    read(\*STDIN, $char, 1) or return \&unexpected;
    ord($char) == 0xfe or return \&unexpected;
    return \&read_header_2;
}

sub read_character;

sub read_header_2 {
    read(\*STDIN, $char, 1) or return undef;
    ord($char) == 0xff or return \&unexpected;
    return \&read_character;
}

sub write_character;

sub read_character {
    read(\*STDIN, $char, 1) or return undef;
    return \&write_character;
}

sub read_null;

sub write_character {
    print $char;
    return \&read_null;
}

sub read_null {
    read(\*STDIN, $char, 1) or return undef;
    ord($char) == 0x00 or return \&unexpected;
    return \&read_character;
}

sub unexpected {
    print "unexpected situation\n";
    if(length $char) {
        print "found character: ". ord($char), "\n";
    }
    else {
        print "found enf of stream\n";
    }
    return undef;
}

my $state = \&read_header_1;
while($state) {
    $state = &$state();
}

which worked perfectly, and implemented the state machine directly.

Now I can save my text messages and have them readable.

shell script state machine

The basic structure of a shell script state machine is an endless loop with a case branch structure inside that responds to a current state variable. To end the loop "break" out of the while loop.

state="start"
while true; do
  case "$state" in 
  "start")       
    echo "initial state"
    state="next"
    ;;
  "next") 
    echo "next state"
    state="done"
    ;;
  "done") 
    echo "done"
    break
    ;;
  *)
    echo "invalid state \"$state\""
    break
    ;;
  esac
done

running the above state machine prints

initial state
next state
done

This structure is useful for programs that are easier to express using a flow chart (state chart) than a linear structure, such as an interactive script with retry options.

temporary file space snippet

Often I need a temporary directory for a shell script to do work in, one that gets cleaned up even if the script is aborted by the user with CTRL-C. I spent an hour or so figuring out how to make the cleanup happen reliably and now use the following snippet for the task of making and cleaning up the temporary directory.

tmp=/tmp/$$
mkdir $tmp || exit 1;
cleanup() { rm -r -f "$tmp"; }
trap "cleanup" EXIT