Phoenix LiveView Test String "can't be blank" not working

I am doing a test with Phoenix Live View:

    assert view 
           |> form("#new_product", product: %{name: nil})
           |> render_change() =~  "can't be blank"

But the test did not accept the assertion.
So changing the string "can't be blank" for "can't be blank" will work the assertion.
I know this is something about the Unicode generated in the HTML.
But I would like to use the 1st string.

What I need to do was import the Phoenix HTML: import Phoenix.HTML
and now pipe the string with the functions html_escape() and safe_to_string():

  assert view 
         |> form("#new_product", product: %{name: nil})
         |> render_change() =~ "can't be blank" |> html_escape() |> safe_to_string()
1 Like

To be precise, this has nothing to do with Unicode. What you’re seeing are HTML entities, special encodings used for HTML-specific characters: HTML Character Entities

Personally, I almost always use Floki (installed by default with Phoenix) for this kind of tests. I parse the document, select the elements I’m interested in, and extract their textual content (which is already HTML-decoded). It looks like this:

assert view 
       |> form("#new_product", product: %{name: nil})
       |> render_change()
       |> Floki.parse_document!()
       |> Floki.find("span.invalid-feedback")
       |> Floki.text() =~ "can't be blank"
4 Likes

=~ does a plain match of text. It’s unanware that the left side is encoded html (it’s still UTF-8). You can either go and make your expected string also encoded (as you did) or adjust the other side by decoding the html to plain strings, as @trisolaran did with html |> Floki.parse_document!() |> Floki.text().

3 Likes

Thank you all it was very helpful!
Another question guys, if I do for example a function for use globally this to other test files.
where is the best place to put it?
I was trying the data_case.ex .
I can create the:

 html_entities_parse(string)  do
   string
   |> html_escape() 
   |> safe_to_string()
 end