Question

I’m new to both ruby and rspec and I’m wondering how to test a class that must parse a file. Here is the function I plan to test:

def self.get_description(event_code)
  # search through a file for the event_code and return
  # the associated description field
end

In production I’ll hard code the file’s path. How should I control the file contents from rspec?

Answer 1

Create a few specs which parse Tempfiles that you create containing valid and invalid input and ensure that the parse function returns the expected results (or exceptions).