[rspec-users] Test HTML output from Rails helper

[Scott Taylor]

On Oct 18, 2008, at 9:16 AM, Pat Maddox wrote:

> Scott Taylor <mailing_lists at railsnewbie.com> writes:
>
>> On Oct 18, 2008, at 4:40 AM, Thomas Watson Steen wrote:
>>
>>> Hi
>>>
>>> I'm using RSpec in with Ruby on Rails. I've made a helper module
>>> method that generates some HTML and would like to create a rspec
>>> test to validate this HTML. I can of cause use regex to validate it
>>> as a string, but would much rather validate it by traversing the DOM
>>> and checking that the elements I expect is present. Any pointers?
>>
>> No - that's not really an option.  The rails stack has no idea  
>> about a
>> DOM.
>
> Hrm...he's just generating HTML, he should be able to use Hpricot.
> Does have_tag work with plain strings, or only in examples where  
> there's
> a response body?  If it's the latter, we should make it work with  
> plain
> strings as well.  But Hpricot would certainly be useful I would think.
>

Yeah.  +1.  Not sure why I didn't think of that.

Scott