readme.md

Rspec custom matchers for xml using Nokogiri XPath selector and optional content to match within selection. See matcher_spec.rb for usage.

Place have_xml.rb in your {Rails.root}/spec/support/matchers directory

Adapted from: Testing XML with rspec, xpath and libxml

have_xml.rb

require 'nokogiri'
RSpec::Matchers.define :have_xml do |xpath, text|
  match do |body|
    doc = Nokogiri::XML::Document.parse(body)
    nodes = doc.xpath(xpath)
    nodes.empty?.should be_false
    if text
      nodes.each do |node|
        node.content.should == text
      end
    end
    true
  end

  failure_message_for_should do |body|
    "expected to find xml tag #{xpath} in:\n#{body}"
  end

  failure_message_for_should_not do |response|
    "expected not to find xml tag #{xpath} in:\n#{body}"
  end

  description do
    "have xml tag #{xpath}"
  end
end

matcher_spec.rb

describe "thing" do
  context 'xml'
    before do
      get "/a_thing", {:format => :xml}
    end

    it "has a thing" do
      response.body.should have_xml '/xpath/to/match' "content with xpath selector"
    end

    it "does not have another thing" do
      response.body.should_not have_xml '/xpath/to/disallow' "content with xpath selector"
    end
  end
end

Thanks for this, one note, if you're parsing xml with CDATA nodes and indentation, node.content will match the line breaks and whitespace in addition to the CDATA wrapped text. To handle that case, I rewrote your nodes.each section as:

  nodes.each do |node|
    cdata = node.children.find { |e| e.cdata? }
    value_to_check = node.text
    value_to_check = cdata.text if cdata
    value_to_check.should == text
  end

Without that change, have_xml fails if you try, for example, this assertion:

should have_xml("/Test/Property/Floorplan/Name", "FP One")

on XML such as:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<Test>
  <Property>
    <Floorplan>
      <Name>
        <![CDATA[FP One]]>
      </Name>
    </Floorplan>
  </Property>
 </Test>

p.s. line 19 of have_xml.rb should read:

  failure_message_for_should_not do |body|

(not |response|)

I've made updates here

• with expect syntax,
• including @benissimo "CDATA unsensitive parsing feature"