Testing for links in a page content in Django

Question

Good day!

So going to my question,

I have a template with some links and I want to assert that they are indeed there in my page.

My html section,

<section>
    <p>Welcome to open radio. We help you get on air!</p>
    <p><a href="{% url 'userlogin' %}">Login</a></p>
    <p><a href="{% url 'liststations' %}">View all our stations</a></p>
    <p><a href="{% url 'userregistration' %}">SignUp!</a></p>      
</section>

My test now,

response = self.client.get(reverse("home"))
assert reverse("userlogin") in response.content
assert reverse("liststations") in response.content
assert reverse("userregistration") in response.content

My test passes and I understand I am not really asserting for the links here but rather for the strings of URLs. How may I test for links specifically?

Answer 1

Django's own test suite uses this to assert a certain url is in the response:

response = self.client.get(reverse("home"))
self.assertContains(response, '<a href="%s">Login</a>' % reverse("userlogin"), html=True)
...

self.assertContains handles both the fact that response is a response object, and that both sides are html and only have to be equivalent, not necessarily equal.

This is assuming you're using (a subclass of) django.test.SimpleTestCase.