If you use the MXUnit testing framework for ColdFusion, you might have come across this earlier -- the assertEquals assertion is case-insensitive.

This means that if you try and compare a string like 'abs' and 'Abs', assertEquals returns true.

And that is ok in certain cases, but is not ok in many other. I guess it boils down to the fact that at the end of the day, ColdFusion is case-insensitive. A variable called 'firstName' is the treated the same as 'FirstName'.

But enough of that.

So how do you test for case-sensitivity in assertEquals assertion?

First I thought I'd write my own assertion. But then there is a much simpler solution. Simply hash the the two strings that one needs to compare and assert that they are NOT equal.

So rather than:

assertEquals("abs", "Abs")

Use

assertNotEquals(hash("abs"), hash("Abs"))

It works quite nicely.

Do you do it differently?

BTW, there some discussion of this on the MXUnit Google Groups as well.

Comments

David wrote on 12/21/09 6:49 AM

I've used that method in the past too to compare two strings based on case.

Another option could be to use Compare.
EG: assertFalse( Compare("one","One") )

That would return a true (non-zero) result and thus fail the test. (asuming you wanted the test to fail!)

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