correction-helper 2021.2.11

Some helpers to help writing correction bots, use by hackinscience.org.

Correction Helper

Project

This is just a set of tools to help writing correction bots in Python for Python.

It is used for hackinscience, but could be used elsewhere.

Security considerations

Running student code is probably really unsafe, unless you trust your students not to drop you a backdoor.

This projet does not help with security in any ways, maybe take a look at firejail if you have trust issues (Yes you can use correction-helper inside firejail).

Usage

To install it, run: pip install correction-helper.

In your checking code, you can use it like this:

The student_code decorator

This decorator is aimed to catch most problems that could happen in student code, use it simply as:

with student_code():
    their_function()

Here is a more complete example:

from correction_helper import fail, student_code

with student_code():
    # Here, if the import fail, if the student prints, or try to exit,
    # it will be reported with a nice message in Markdown, and your process
    # will exit with code 1.
    from solution import missing_card


def check_deck(deck, expected):
    with student_code(print_expect=expected):
        # Here, if the function raises, if the student prints, or try to exit,
        # it will be reported too, and exit with code 1 too.
        # If the student prints what is expected to be returned
        # (the `print_expect` parameter), we told that, too.
        missing = missing_card(deck)
    if missing != expected:
        fail(f"""With the following deck (missing card is `{expected}`):

{code(deck, "text")}

You're returning:

{code(missing, "text")}
""")

Allowed parameters for student_code, and their default values

exception_prefix="Got an exception:"

Printed right before the exception, if any.

friendly=False

To use, or not friendly-traceback instead of bare Python exceptions.

print_allowed=False

To allow the use to print to stdout / stderr, you can read what they printed using the value of the context manager:

with student_code(print_allowed=True) as run:
    their_function()
assert run.stderr == ""
assert run.stdout == "42"

print_prefix="Your code printed something (it should **not**):"

Message to display when they printed and print_allowed was False.

print_expect=None

String that you bet they'll print instead of return.

print_expect_message

Default value:

Your code printed what I expected it to return so maybe just replace your print call by a return statement.

This is the message displayed when you won you bet with print_expect, they printed instead of returning.

Good practices

Try first if the student code works, if it works, it works. Only if the code does not work, try to understand why.