Question

I have following check in my WebDriver script, where I am pulling a date field out of a page.

IWebElement crInfo = driver.FindElement(By.Id("crInfo"));
string copyDate = crInfo.Text;
// From the converted string now pulling out the year by index and length
string copyYear = copyDate.Substring(2, 4);
// Get the current year
int nowYear = DateTime.Today.Year;
// Converting the year
nowYear.ToString().Trim();
// Make the comparison to be sure the copyright is using the current date
Assert.AreEqual(copyYear,nowYear);

As noted in the snippet what I am trying to do is confirm that the date that appears in the page is the current year, this is just a web front end check that the function put in place is returning the right value. When I run this though what I see in the NUnit console is:

error: Expected: “2012”
But was: 2012

I don’t really get the difference between the two, is the quoted value a string? I added the conversion in my script to be sure that they are the same type and added the trim in case there might be white space.

If I want to make this work, what is it that I am not doing to get the Assetion to pass?

Answer 1

Look at your types and the assertion:

string copyYear = ...
int nowYear = ...
Assert.AreEqual(copyYear,nowYear);

That assertion will never ever pass, whatever the values are. A string is never equal to an integer in C#. While there are languages which do type coercion in this sort of scenario, C# isn’t one of them.

Also note that this line is useless:

nowYear.ToString().Trim();

Strings are immutable in .NET – methods like Trim() don’t change the string they’re called on – they return a new string. You’re ignoring that return value… and anyway, you’re calling it on a string you completely ignore afterwards. You could use:

string nowYearAsString = nowYear.ToString().Trim();
Assert.AreEqual(copyYear, nowYearAsString);

… or you could parse copyYear to an int first instead, and compare that instead:

int copyYearAsInt = int.Parse(copyYear);
Assert.AreEqual(copyYearAsInt, nowYear);