How do you avoid loops in your specs?
Like Alex points out, this is a test smell according to Gerard Mezos. In .NET they have something called as data driven unit test. In Ruby we can accomplish the same thing using the following:def data_driven_spec(container)
container.each do |element|
yield(element)
end
end
and in your test you can do :
it "should return back slash pre-pended to all special characters" do
SPECIAL_CHARACTERS = ["?", "^", "$", "/", "\\", "[", "]", "{", "}", "(", ")", "+", "*", "." ]
data_driven_spec(SPECIAL_CHARACTERS) do |special_character|
result = Regexpgen::Component.match_this_character(special_character)
result.should == "\\#{special_character}"
end
end
The code is taken from my regexpgen ruby gem. My test differs from the message that goes in to the it method. I have raised the level of abstraction, whereas Alex substitues the a variable to vary the message.
