Question

I’m writing unit tests for checking some XML builder.

Now I’m running into the problem of syntactical differences between the expected result and the actual result, despite their identical semantics.

Example:

Expected result:

<parent><child attr="test attribute">text here</child></parent>

Actual result:

<parent>
  <child attr="test attribute">
    text here
  </child>
</parent>

I tried normalizing the xml using XmlUtil.serialize(), however this seems to keep the whitespaces, leaving syntactical differences.

How can I get the normalized/canonical form of xml strings in order to make my tests more robust?

I’m writing a Grails application, so I’m fine with any solution in Groovy or Java.

Answer 1

You can use the Groovy XMLUnit utility like this:

XMLUnit.setIgnoreWhitespace(true)
XMLUnit.setIgnoreComments(true)
XMLUnit.setIgnoreDiffBetweenTextAndCDATA(true)
XMLUnit.setNormalizeWhitespace(true)

XMLUnit.compareXML(expectedXml, actualXml)

To compare XML files while ignoring the syntactical differences.