Taming assert_select with css_select and Regexp.escape

I had a lot of trouble writing a test to check whether all elements of an array were showing up in a table properly; I needed more fine-grained testing than assert_select was allowing me. I needed to guarantee that every element in an array could be found as a child of a particular table.

Fortunately, I noticed that Rails also has a css_select method which returns an array of selected elements without running tests on them. This lets you run your own tests using the results of the selection.

This isn't the prettiest code in the world (I'm also testing a formatting helper, hence the literals '$200.00' and so on), so I'll probably refactor it later. There might also be a way to do this more elegantly with assert_select. But I think this does show the utility of css_select.

elements = css_select('table#investors tr td')

[[investors(:investor_8),'$200.00'],
[investors(:investor_9),'$343.40']].each do |i,amount|

assert_not_nil elements.detect \
    { |e| e.to_s =~ /#{i.name}/ }

assert_not_nil elements.detect \
    { |e| e.to_s =~ /#{Regexp.escape(amount)}/ }

end

Things to watch out for:

• You need to force the conversion of the element to a String for the regular expression comparison (with to_s)
• In this particular example, since I am using string literals with special characters, I had to use Regexp.escape to make $ and . match properly