Adding loose comparison -- code, and pull request if interested.

[jejacks0n]

I wanted a loose comparison type of thing so I threw one together. I'm wondering if this is a feature worth implementing, and if so, I'll submit a pull request with proper specs and an adjusted matcher name -- if not someone else might find this useful.

gist: https://gist.github.com/jejacks0n/6384919

This allows specifying attributes that you want to ensure are there, but that you don't really care about the value of by using a wildcard (*).

eg.

expect(response_body).to look_like <<-JSON
  {
    "access_token": "*",
    "token_type": "bearer",
  }
JSON

Thoughts / feelings? If it's something worth adding, what would you like me to change?

[laserlemon]

I'm leery of the syntax because the "*" syntax is perfectly valid JSON. Plus this is possible using a different combination of matcher, although it might not be as short. I'd like to hear others' thoughts.

[jejacks0n]

Yeah, that's why I'm posting it as a question instead of spending time on the pull request first.. I find it useful -- I'm using RSpec API Documentation (which is great), and wanted the specs to be a little more readable.. it's usefulness is limited for sure, but I think there's value in having the spec read nicely as well as the documentation.

I've used something like this on a different project in cucumber and actually found it to be much more useful there.. My RSpec example is how I'm using it, but I think there's an argument for it. For instance, I don't like the idea of excluding created_at and updated_at, etc.. at a global level.. I want to document as well as ensure that they're in the response, I just don't care what their value is. The current library only supports excluding them entirely and this allows for them to be asserted as being there.

[jejacks0n]

If there's a different way to accomplish this I would like to know -- I dug around but didn't see anything obvious.

Thanks for the good library btw. =)

[laserlemon]

If you don't care about the values, you could achieve the same result using the have_json_path matcher. Or if you're using pure RSpec, you can use RSpec's built-in include matcher which does hash subset matching. json_spec is most useful in Cucumber.

[mathieujobin]

I would need something similar, where I want to ignore value for a few keys

right now we are using exclude_keys but this completely ignore the presence of the keys.
I need the key to be present, but do not want to deal with varying values