Question

I have the following strings:

I submit the following values: username 'foo', password 'bar'
I submit the following values: username 'foo', password 'bar','foo', profile 'bar', extra 'something'

I am trying to match the value pairs but I am not sure how I can repeat a pattern.

So the result I want is:

 username 'foo'
 password 'bar'
 ...

My regex so far:

 I submit the following values: (\w+\s[^,]+),

I need to find a way to repeat the pattern and I also need to take care of the missing comma at the end. I am using the result in a Cucumber like testing framework for Python (freshen).

The end result will be something like:

@When(r'I submit the following values: (\w+\s[^,]+), ...')
def post_values_to_url(*args):
    post_dict = {}
    for pairs in args:
         #add values to dict

    response = client.get('this/is/a/url', post_dict)

Answer 1

If you need to be able to parse an arbitrary number of pairs, then I’d suggest using a table, e.g.:

When I submit the following values:
  | username | foo |
  | password | bar |

There’s a rows_hash method on Cucumber::Ast::Table that will give you what you need.

However, I suspect that using a ‘one-size-fits-all’ step definition like this is going make your scenarios difficult to read. Instead, how about doing something like this:

Given a user exists with username "foo"
And that user has the profile "bar"
When I login as "foo" with password "bar"
...

Edit: Just noticed you’re not actually Cucumber. But I suspect Freshen would also support tables.