Unpredictable behaviour of scala triple quoted string - string

Question

I'm using junit in scala to compare string output from my scala code. Something like :
val expected = """<Destination id="0" type="EMAIL">
<Address>
me#test.com
</Address>
<TimeZone>
US/Eastern
</TimeZone>
<Message>
</Message>
</Destination>
"""
val actual = getTextToLog()
info(" actual = " + actual)
assert(expected == actual)
The issue is that for some strings, assertions like :
assert(expected == actual)
work and for some they strings they dont. Even when I copy actual (logged to Eclipse console) from Eclipse console and paste it into expected just to be sure , the assertion still fails.
What am I missing?

Answer 1

OK, since this turns out to be a whitespace issues, you should sanitise the two strings before comparing them. Look at the RichString methods like .lines, for example, which might let you create a line-ending or whitespace-agnostic comparison method.
Here is one naive way of doing this with implicit conversions:
import scala.language.implicitConversions
object WhiteSpace {
implicit def strToWhiteSpace(s: String) = new WhiteSpace(s)
}
class WhiteSpace(val s: String) {
def `~==` (other: String) = s.lines.toList == other.lines.toList
}
which allows
import WhiteSpace._
assert(expected ~== actual)
Or you could extend the appropriate jutils class to add an agnostic version of assertEquals.
Note that this comparison deconstructs both strings in the same way. This is much safer than sending one of them on a round-trip conversion.
Whitespace/crlf issues are so common that there's no point fighting it by trying to stop the mismatches; just do agnostic comparisons.