Question

My spec wants to test if a certain substring occurs withing any entry of an array of strings.

p @banner.errors.messages[:base] #=> ["Specify a leader text or an image, not both"]

All my spec really wants to know, is whether or not the “not both” string occurs in any of the array-items in there.

 @banner.errors.messages[:base].should include(/not both/)

fails, because "not both" is not included in ["Specify a leader text or an image, not both"]

Note: When I test against the literal string (should include(“Specify…both”), things work. But that seems dirty to me. Such user-faced texts are not critical for the test to pass; and such texts will change: every time the error message is changed, I will need to update my tests.

Answer 1

Maybe like this?

@banner.errors.messages[:base].join.should match(/not both/)

But note that there is a edge case where the match might be over two or more lines, e.g. a line ending with “not ” and the next line is ” both”.