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I have unittests class that I have test methods. Now in in of the methods I temporarily create a file to compare with static file that is inside module. After tests are run, I want to delete that file

Now in setUp method, I have defined attribute:

self.dir_path

which shows the path to the directory of the file. So To get the file, I can simply write: 

'%s/some_file.xls' % self.dir_path

Now to delete it, I would do something like:

os.remove(`%s/some_file.xls` % self.dir_path)

But tearDownClass is a class method and it won't see self.dir_path. If I would use inside tearDown method, then it will try to remove that file after every test (that file is created only in one of the test methods), which would fail.

So what is the best option for such case? Should I just remove that file inside that test method where it is created? I thought to make use of teardown methods functionality which are meant to do just that, but it seems I can't.

Or maybe there is some better way then to temporarily create a file and then delete it after testing?

Note. I need to create that file, because I'm testing reports that are generated in excel format and file is generated with one library, but generated content is checked with another (xlwt for creation, xlrd for comparing the result with static excel file).

Andrius
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    Have you considered maybe instead using [tempfile](https://docs.python.org/3/library/tempfile.html) to do this? You can use a context manager that will clean itself up after usage and handle all that mess for you – idjaw Oct 18 '16 at 18:11
  • @idjaw I thought of using tempfile, but couldn't get an idea how to create it as tempfile when file is created from workbook (using `xlwt` library). Like `wb = xlwt.workbook(), sheet = wb.add_sheet('a'), wb.save('test.xls')` – Andrius Oct 18 '16 at 18:17
  • I've never used that module, however, look at this question: http://stackoverflow.com/q/19109281/1832539. Based on the question asker's problem, they seem to be successful at writing xlwt with tempfile, their issues were with certain types. So maybe that process might help? – idjaw Oct 18 '16 at 18:30
  • @idjaw I tried that example, but it saves and nothing is deleted. It is kind of weird, that he uses normal save on workbook, and then second save using `tempfile.TemporaryFile()`. – Andrius Oct 19 '16 at 06:42

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