Inspecting the page content in a Cucumber session

When you need to see the content of a page (i.e. not all the HTML but the relevant text body)

• you can do pp (html_content)
  • pp will format the html String human readable pretty printed
• where html_content can be replaced by one of the following commands:

Rails

body or response.body

Capybara:

• page.driver.html.content
• page.body

Webrat:

Nokogiri::HTML(response.body).content

The returned strings can be cleaned up by calling .gsub(/^\s*$/, '').squeeze("\n") on them.\
Although this may be useful for debugging, when writing custom steps you may be better off using XPath.