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Escaping of quotation marks in Cucumber steps and step definitions

Dominik Schöler
February 25, 2011Software engineer at makandra GmbH

Issue

When you have a Cucumber step like

Then I should see "Did you see those \"quotation marks\" over there?"
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you'll run into trouble. Cucumber won't take your escaped quotation marks.

Workarounds

One workaround is to write the step as regex (since there is a step taking a regex):

Then I should see /Did you see those "quotation marks" over there\?/

Keep in mind it’s a regex – escape regex characters like '?'.

When you have a Cucumber step like

Then I should fill in "query" with "\"some phrase\""

The following step will match any string that follows after colon and ends at the line end (and this string may include quotes):

When /^I fill in "([^"]*)" with: (.*)$/ do |field, value|
   pending # express the regexp above with the code you wish you had
end

Using Spreewald

Or you can simply use Spreewald's Show archive.org snapshot Multiline String in your Scenario step:

When I fill in "query" with: 
  """
  "some phrase"
  """

Also see How to use triple quotes inside a Cucumber docstring.

Posted by Dominik Schöler to makandra dev (2011-02-25 10:27)