The Cucumber Book, 2nd Edition

Capturing Arguments

You’ll notice that in the step we’ve been using as an example, we’ve talked about the sum of $100 the whole time. What if we had another scenario where we needed to deposit a different amount of money into the account? Would we need another step definition, like this?

Given(/I have deposited \$100 in my Account/) do
  # TODO: code goes here
end

Given(/I have deposited \$250 in my Account/) do
  # TODO: code goes here
end

Happily, we don’t. This is where the flexibility of regular expressions comes into play. We can use two of regular expressions’ most useful features here to capture any dollar amount as an argument to the step definition. Those features are capture groups and wildcards.

Capture Groups ...