LinLog

OK, I'm not crazy! At least, not for the reason I thought.

I was playing with adding some dependencies to my Selenium PHPUnit tests. See, PHPUnit 3.4 has this handy little test dependency feature, the @depends annotation. It's basically a PHPDoc comment that includes a test name. You add that to a test and, if PHPUnit hasn't run the dependency yet, it skips the current test.

Well, I'm working on Windows. And every time I added an @depends to a test, PHPUnit would skip it. Even if the dependency had run! Even on the example from the documentation! I thought I was losing my mind.

However, it turns out that it's a known bug in PHPUnit. Basically just a line ending issue. The bug ticket has a 2 character patch that fixes it, or you can just save your files with UNIX line endings. Go figure.

Update: Wow, talk about weird timing. It turns out this issue was fixed in PHPUnit 3.4.1, which was released the day after I posted this.

Here's a weird little "feature" I came across the other day. It seems that Selenium discriminates between spacing in source and rendered HTML. I suppose this shouldn't be that surprising, but I just hadn't thought to account for it.

Here's what happened: I was writing a Selenium test case using PHPUnit's Selenium extension and I kept getting a failure on a simple assertTextPresent() call. I checked the page manually, and the text was definitely there. I selected the text and right-clicked to try the assertion in Selenium IDE, and it worked there. Then I tried copying the expected string out of my PHP test case and checking that in the IDE, and that's where it failed.

The only difference: one extra space in the PHP string. The real kicker is that that space is present in the page source. But when I stopped to think about it, it make perfect sense. Selenium interacts with the page through the DOM, and multiple spaces get rendered as one in HTML. The source is irrelevant - it's the rendered code that counts. I'll have to remember that for next time.