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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-20T22:11:56+00:00

I’m working my way through the Rails Tutorial book by Hartl and I’m completely

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I’m working my way through the Rails Tutorial book by Hartl and I’m completely stuck on one of the tests. The test (right from the book) is very simple:

require 'spec_helper'
describe UsersController do
render_views
describe "GET 'show'" do
    before(:each) do
        @user = Factory(:user)
    end
    ...
    it "should include the user's name" do
        get :show, :id => @user
        response.should have_selector('h1', :content => @user.name)
    end
end

The test fails with the following error:

UsersController GET 'show' should include the user's name
Failure/Error: response.should have_selector('h1', :content => @user.name)
expected following output to contain a <h1>Steve T</h1> tag:...

The page renders properly in the browser. Here is a snipped from the HTML source rendered by the browser:

<section class="round">
<h1>
<img alt="Steve T" class="gravatar" src="http://gravatar.com/..." />
Steve T
</h1>
</section>

I can even add a call to: print response.body in the controller spec and it will output the tags properly.

Any ideas on what I may be doing wrong?

UPDATE – It seems like we have identified a potentially significant item: The HTML in the rspec test failure message is missing the body tag everything inside it.

1) UsersController GET 'show' should include the user's name Failure/Error: response.should have_selector('h1', :content => @user.name) expected following output to contain a <h1>Steve T</h1> tag: <!DOCTYPE html> <html><head> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=US-ASCII"> <title>Ruby on Rails Tutorial Sample App | Steve T</title> </head></html> # ./spec/controllers/users_controller_spec.rb:33:in block (3 levels) in <top (required)>'

Does anyone know why, if the page in the browser includes the <body> tags and the inner content and if print response.body shows the content, why would the error message skip it?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    It turns out that syntax mistake in the partial that loads my style sheets was essentially commenting out all the body tag content. The question is why Firefox 3 rendered the HTML anyway. I actually solved the problem inadvertently by upgrading to Firefox 4. In Firefox 4, the body of the page didn’t render and the debugging tools led me to the erroneous markup

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