Trying to get a windows rails environment going this morning I stumbled upon something interesting – all ‘a’ characters were missing from cucumber and rspec output.

This has something to do with UTF-8 encoding and there’s a ticket and wiki post on cucumber about it, but no solution that I found acceptable.

Everything comes down to having change encoding in the current cmd window. This is achieved via a simple call to chcp 1252, but nobody want’s to do this every time, right?

To get this executed automaticaly and without resorting to serious registry editing, simply add this line to your cucmber.bat and any other batch files that are exhibiting this problem. You can find cucumber.bat in your /ruby/bin folder.

Here’s what it looks like:

chcp 1252
@ECHO OFF
IF NOT "%~f0" == "~f0" GOTO :WinNT
@"ruby.exe" "c:/ruby/bin/cucumber" %1 %2 %3 %4 %5 %6 %7 %8 %9
GOTO :EOF
:WinNT
@"ruby.exe" "%~dpn0" %*

it "should be its own root" do
  @node.root.should == @node
end

it "should add a child" do
  @node.children.size.should == 0

  child = @klass.new

  @node.add_child(child)
  @node.children.size.should == 1

  child.parent.should == @node
  child.root.should == @node
end

Looks beautiful. However, look at line #2. What would the output be if that test fails? The message would be something like this: "expected #{@target.inspect} to the same as #{@expected.inspect}".

Inspecting an object like a tree node could result in multiple pages worth of data and the output basically becomes unreadable if there’s an array of objects.

This problem could easily be fixed with a custom expectation matcher.

module BeTheSameAsMatcher
  class BeTheSameAs
    def initialize(expected)
      @expected = expected
    end

    def matches?(target)
      @target = target
      @target.eql?(@expected)
    end

    def failure_message
      "expected <#{to_string(@target)}> to " +
      "the same as <#{to_string(@expected)}>"
    end

    def negative_failure_message
      "expected <#{to_string(@target)}> not to " +
      "be the same as <#{to_string(@expected)}>"
    end

    # Returns string representation of an object.
    def to_string(value)
      # indicate a nil
      if value.nil?
        'nil'
      end

      # join arrays
      if value.class == Array
        return value.join(", ")
      end

      # otherwise return to_s() instead of inspect()
      return value.to_s
    end
  end

  # Actual matcher that is exposed.
  def be_the_same_as(expected)
    BeTheSameAs.new(expected)
  end
end

As you can see, methods failure_message and negative_failure_message define our error messages. Instead of default inspect call, I’m using a custom to_string method which will either return a join for an Array or to_s for any other object.

To make this available in all of your specs, the module needs to be added in your `spec_helper.rb` like so:

require 'spec/be_the_same_as'

Spec::Runner.configure do |config|
  config.include(BeTheSameAsMatcher)
end

After this, we can change our line #2 from the original script to this:

it "should be its own root" do
  @node.root.should be_the_same_as(@node)
end

It’s possible to load that data into your _development database so that you can use the same data while looking at your site in the browser. This can be achieved using a rake command.

rake db:fixtures:load

Maintaining your fixtures could become realy tiresome, especially in text mode. So, there’s a way to generate YAML fixtures from the data. I use the following method to so.

def table_to_yaml(table_name, key_column = 'name')
  return nil if table_name.nil?

  list = ActiveRecord::Base.connection.select_all(
        "SELECT * FROM #{table_name.to_s} ORDER BY id ASC"
  )

  result = ""

  list.each do |record|
    name = record[key_column.to_s].to_permalink
    name = "_#{name}" if name =~ /^[^a-zA-Z]/
    hash = {}
    hash[name] = record
    result < < hash.to_yaml().gsub(/^---s*$/m, '')
  end

  return result
end

key_column is a column name which will be used to name your records in YAML.

This doesn’t generate the actual files, but you can grab the output and save it in your fixtures.