The Computer Is Always Right

The other day I had trouble getting a Cucumber scenario to work. Here’s what happened, partly to have a post I can come back to, when (!) my future self runs into a similar problem.

I am using Cucumber and a very stripped down version of the project looked like this:

% tree
.
└── features
    ├── example.feature
    ├── step_definitions
    │   └── step_def.rb
    └── support
        └── env.rb

All code is entirely contrived and tailored to demonstrate the issue I bumped into. The example file features/example.feature first:

Feature: What is happening?

Scenario Outline: Matching step definitions -- or not

Given a step that mentions '<a_string>'
And another step that uses <a_number> like this
Then all is good

Examples:
|  a_string |  a_number |
|      word |        42 |
| two words | 3.1415927 |

There are very plain step definitions too (in file step_definitions/step_def.rb):

Given("a step that mentions {string}") do |string|
  pending # Write code here …
end

Given(/another step that uses ((\d+)|(\d+\.\d+)) like this/) do |number|
  pending # Write code here …
end

Then("all is good") do
  pending # Write code here …
end

Running this gives the expected result: Cucumber kindly informs that there are pending steps:

% bundle exec cucumber
Feature: What is happening?

  Scenario Outline: Matching step definitions -- or not # features/example.feature:3
    Given a step that mentions '<a_string>'             # features/example.feature:5
    And another step that uses <a_number> like this     # features/example.feature:6
    Then all is good                                    # features/example.feature:7

    Examples:
      | a_string   | a_number  |
      | word       | 42        |
      | two words  | 3.1415927 |

2 scenarios (2 pending)
6 steps (4 skipped, 2 pending)
0m0.012s

However at some point, I started getting another result (comments added by cucumber removed):

% bundle exec cucumber
Feature: What is happening?

  Scenario Outline: Matching step definitions -- or not
    Given a step that mentions '<a_string>'
    And another step that uses <a_number> like this
    Then all is good

    Examples:
      | a_string   | a_number  |
      | word       | 42        |
      | two words  | 3.1415927 |

2 scenarios (2 undefined)
6 steps (4 skipped, 2 undefined)
0m0.009s

You can implement step definitions for undefined steps with these snippets:

Given("a step that mentions {string}") do |string|
  pending # Write code here that turns the phrase above into concrete actions
end

Wait. What?!? I stared at the existing step definition for a while, comparing it with the one printed in the message above:

Given("a step that mentions {string}") do |string|
  pending # Write code here …
end

Confusion and disbelief kicked in.

One of the principles I use is this:

The computer is always right.

— Not sure where I picked this up. If you know the (or a) source, tell me please.

This is true even if the behaviour is wrong. In this case: If cucumber cannot find a step definition … it CANNOT find a step definition. But why would that be? Why did it happen in this particular case?

I even called in colleagues (remotely) and we stared at the code collectively. Still nothing.

Luckily a trace of a previous successful run was still available in the console output. So I copy-and-pasted the scenarios, and compared them piece by piece in a Pry session:

% pry
[1] pry(main)> works = File.read 'features/works.feature'
=> "Feature: …"
[2] pry(main)> broken = File.read 'features/broken.feature'
=> "Feature: …"
[3] pry(main)> works == broken
=> false

So there is in fact a difference. But what? Where?
Using the same pry session we found out:

[4] pry(main)> works.each_codepoint.zip(broken.each_codepoint).select{|el| el[0] != el[1] }
=> [
    [0] [
        [0] 32,
        [1] 160
    ]
]

What this does: The codepoints of both strings are combined in pairs, and then the pairs that are different are selected. Here’s what the Ruby Documentation says about each_codepoint:

Passes the Integer ordinal of each character in str, also known as a codepoint when applied to Unicode strings to the given block. For encodings other than UTF-8/UTF-16(BE|LE)/UTF-32(BE|LE), values are directly derived from the binary representation of each character. If no block is given, an enumerator is returned instead.

“hello\u0639”.each_codepoint {|c| print c, ‘ ‘ }

produces:

104 101 108 108 111 1593

➙ https://ruby-doc.org/core-2.7.1/String.html#method-i-each_codepoint

The small piece that changed the behaviour was a space, just not a ‘normal’ space, but a NO-BREAK SPACE (see, for example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-breaking_space for more about this topic).

Lessons I learned (again):

1. Some problems are hard to see, and in this case it was even invisible.
2. The message was correct: The step was not defined, it only looked (to the human eye) as if it was.
3. Using <spacebar> gives a different result than <option>-<sapacebar>.