Cucumber Recipes

Recipe 30

Parse HTML Tables

Problem

You’re testing a web page containing tabular data (or any repeating data, really), and you need to compare the contents to a table in your Cucumber scenario.

Ingredients

• Capybara^[193] for testing web applications

• Capybara’s arsenal of finders^[194] for traversing patterns in HTML

• XPath^[195] for describing the locations of objects on the page

Solution

Capybara is a Ruby web testing library. It provides a simple API for visiting web pages and parsing the results. Behind the scenes, Capybara will either launch a real browser (for non-Ruby web apps) or call directly into the server code (for Ruby apps built on Rails, Sinatra, or any other Rack framework).

In this recipe, you’ll serve a simple static site ...