Using webrat's contain(text) matcher with haml

Question

I'm using the following webrat matcher:

response.should contain(text)

With the following haml:

%p
  You have
  = current_user.credits
  credits

I've written the cucumber step 'Then I should see "You have 10 credits"', which uses the webrat matcher above. The step fails, webrat does not find the text in the response because the haml actually produces

<p>You have
10
credits</p>

How can I get the matcher to match the output that haml produces?

Note: the above is a simplified example to the situation i'm dealing with. Writing the following haml is not an acceptable solution:

%p= "You have #{current_user.credits} credits"

Answer 1

You're right, this is a pain. I've found Webrat to be annoyingly touchy too much of the time.

Two ideas:

1. Fix your test. In this case you want it to be blind to newlines, so get rid of them all: response.tr("\n","").should contain(text)
2. Fix your Haml. This is probably the better option. You can use the multiline terminator | to tell Haml not to put line breaks in:

    %p
      You have |
      = current_user.credits |
      credits

See the Haml reference for more obscure stuff like this. (A surprising amount of which has to do with whitespace.)

Answer 2

I've found that something like:

response.should contain(/You have 10 credits/m)

will often give me the match I want without me having to goof with my Haml. Given the choice between mucking with my markup, which I really want to be readable, and changing my matcher to a regular expression, the latter seems a small price to pay for the more straightforward coding of the view.

Answer 3

Better than

%p= "You have #{current_user.credits} credits"

would be

%p You have #{current_user.credits} credits

since Haml automatically interpolates text nodes.

Answer 4

There are various facilities in Haml for manipulating whitespace, but the correct thing to do here is to either revise the matcher to be whitespace-independent or to use a filter for writing your inline content. For example:

%p
  :plain
    You have #{current_user.credits} credits

Or if you need more complex logic:

%p
  :erb
    You have <%= current_user.credits %> credits

Haml is designed for efficiently expressing the structure of a document, but it's not so good at expressing inline content. When you want to do fancy inline stuff (as here), it makes sense to drop into ERB/HTML rather than going purely Haml. For more details see this blog post.