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5.3.9 Getting Extended Error Information

Some applications can make use of more error information (for example, an integrated development environment, or IDE). Such an application can retrieve supplemental information about errors and failures by using an alternate `TestResult` implementation, and extending the `defaultTestResult()` method of the `TestCase` class to provide it.

Here is a brief example of a `TestResult` subclass which stores the actual exception and traceback objects. (Be aware that storing traceback objects can cause a great deal of memory not to be reclaimed when it otherwise would be, which can have effects that affect the behavior of the tests.)

    import unittest

    class MyTestCase(unittest.TestCase):
        def defaultTestResult(self):
            return MyTestResult()

    class MyTestResult(unittest.TestResult):
        def __init__(self):
            self.errors_tb = []
            self.failures_tb = []

        def addError(self, test, err):
            self.errors_tb.append((test, err))
            unittest.TestResult.addError(self, test, err)

        def addFailure(self, test, err):
            self.failures_tb.append((test, err))
            unittest.TestResult.addFailure(self, test, err)

Tests written using `MyTestCase` as the base class, instead of `TestCase`, will allow tools to extract additional information from the results object.