Comments on: Just Enough Regular Expressions for Cucumber

By: Rails Testing – Cucumber – Regex « DevItYrslf.RoR.jQ

Rails Testing – Cucumber – Regex « DevItYrslf.RoR.jQ — Mon, 26 Dec 2011 16:29:05 +0000

[...] Just Enough Regular Expressions for Cucumber — Richard Lawrence — Richard Lawrence. Share this:TwitterFacebookLike this:LikeBe the first to like this post. [...]

By: Richard Lawrence

Richard Lawrence — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 17:31:03 +0000

You’re right, Jon. I think I’ve only used that pattern with Ruby and Java, so I didn’t think about the .NET escape sequence. It definitely reads better with

(.*)

, but it’s less precise. Since the

is greedy,

"(.*)"

will jump over double quotes to match a later double quote, which can lead to some surprising matches.

By: Jon Archer

Jon Archer — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 16:27:51 +0000

So this may be due to the fact that I’m recovering from a 3 year bout of management and that C# is new to me, but I had a few moments of trouble getting the pattern for capturing quoted text to work, i.e. this one: “[^\"]*”

It seems it was all down to the fact that when using the @”…” form in C# to declare the string pattern one escapes inline quotes by double quoting not using the \”

This worked for me:

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[When(@"^.*username ""([^""]*)"".*password ""([^""]*)"".*$")]
public void Login(string username, string password)
{
user = securityFactility.Authenticate(username, password);
}



Although I think I prefer [When(@"^.*username ""(.*)"".*password ""(.*)"".*$")]

By: Abder-Rahman

Abder-Rahman — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 15:34:21 +0000

Thanks a lot for this excellent article. What was missing for me especially when coming to regular expressions.

Thanks a lot.

By: Richard Lawrence

Richard Lawrence — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 00:40:41 +0000

Good catch. I’ll update the post.

By: Jon Archer

Jon Archer — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 00:27:18 +0000

This is just the kind of info I needed: a simple cheat sheet of techniques for the commonest things I think I’m going to need to do w/Cuke4Nuke. I’m very glad you wrote it up. Thanks also for the link to my post

One thing I did notice here that I want to ask about. After explaining the anchors and their use, I note that you didn’t actually have them in place on your examples in the captures section. Now is that just accidental, or is there a cunning rationale to that which I’m missing?