As some of you know I am currently working on a project to allow
Simple Test to be Apache-Test compliant. The process to take in
doing so is to enable Simple Test to produce TAP compliant
output. To do so obviously requires a healthy knowledge of the
different aspects of the TAP protocol. The best way for me to
get a grasp of something is of course to write about it. I
gleaned pretty much all of this information from CPAN’s TAP
format documentation. The general format of TAP is really quite
straightforward. An example TAP file is shown below: # Test
Input File ok 1 - Input file opened not ok 2 - First line of the
input valid ok 3 - Read the rest of the file not ok 4 -
Summarized correctly # TODO Not written yet ok 5 - Test for file
contents # SKIP File not world Readable You notice that there
our 3 different types of lines. The first one you encounter is
1..4. This is called the plan. Basically it is used to tell the
testing harness how many tests you are expecting to perform.
This line will usually be the fi