Cucumber Expressions and special characters

[aslakhellesoy]

Cucumber Expressions currently use some special characters:

• { and } for parameters. (The optional : inside also has special meaning)
• ( and ) for optional text
• / (not yet used, but planned for alternation, e.g. likes/loves becomes (?:likes|loves)

So the question is - should we allow escaping of these characters so they are not interpreted? How likely is it that someone will want to escape them?

Thoughts?

[aslakhellesoy]

Not a priority

[customcommander]

@aslakhellesoy I couldn't figure out why my step definition wasn't working until I found this issue. I was trying to do something along those lines:

Given foo() is invoked with
  """
  {"foo": "bar"}
  """

So of course I could totally not use brackets but I wasn't expecting that step definitions would forbid the use of some characters.

My £0.02 :)

[aslakhellesoy]

Can you share what Cucumber expression you had in your step def?

The docs for Cucumber Expressions explains that parenthesis have special meaning.

Did you miss the documentation, or was it just unclear? How can we improve the docs and feedback you get from Cucumber?

[stale]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be closed in a week if no further activity occurs.

[aslakhellesoy]

We won't allow escaping special characters. People who need that level of control should use Regular Expressions in their stepdefs.

[lock]

This thread has been automatically locked since there has not been any recent activity after it was closed. Please open a new issue for related bugs.