How to match parentheses in Cucumber test

Question

I currently have a problem with Java and Cucumber. Accessing a website's element by using Selenium, I want to use phrases like the following:

Then the value of the attribute XYZ should be 1000

That example is quite trivial and works fine for each attribute name by using the Java annotation

@Then("the value of the attribute (.*) should be (.*)")

except for the following use-case: an attribute name contains parentheses like ABC(s).

While using Eclipse and JUnit, a Cucumber test with a string containing parentheses like that is not even recognized completely but just the part of the string before the opening bracket. Any ideas or solutions?

What seems to be the problem officer? http://regex101.com/r/iW3xS3 — sshashank124, May 05 '14 at 09:02
If you want to use special symbols in your regex, are you escaping them out appropriately? e.g. for `(` you need to write `\\(` — Peter Lawrey, May 05 '14 at 09:13
Well, it's definitely not the regex itself what causes the problem. Cucumber just finds `Then the value of the attribute XYZ` instead of `Then the value of the attribute XYZ(s) should be 1000` when I run a JUnit-Test — sascha_lamp, May 05 '14 at 09:15
Having `(` or `)` in the input shouldn't make any difference. AFAIK Cucumber uses standard regex which doesn't care about such things. — Peter Lawrey, May 05 '14 at 09:20
A phrase containing parentheses is simply cut of at the first parenthesis' position. — sascha_lamp, May 05 '14 at 09:22

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered May 06 '14 at 11:20

1

It doesn't matter whether the attribute name contains any parentheses.

When using this method:

@Then("^the value of the attribute (.*) should be (.*)$")
public void checkAttributeValue(String name, String value)
        throws Throwable {
    System.out.println("Name: " + name + " value: " + value);
}

And

Then the value of the attribute XYZ(s) should be 1000

I get

Name: XYZ(s) value: 1000

Which I think is what you expect.

answered May 06 '14 at 11:20

Pieter Kuijpers

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Okay, it turned out that only Eclipse's JUnit-View doesn't print the test-cases correctly. For example for the case `Then the value of the attribute XYZ(s) should be 1000` the following is printed: `Then the value of the attribute XYZ`. – sascha_lamp May 06 '14 at 12:43

How to match parentheses in Cucumber test

1 Answers1