The Rails 1.2.x tree has quickly become indispensable to me. RESTful routes with respond_to to serve multiple content types makes API development a snap. Meanwhile assert_select provides incredibly flexible view testing. assert_select is all about CSS-style selectors for validating markup, so it’s only natural to want to use it on XML. Overall it works pretty well, but perhaps you’ve seen warnings like:

ignoring attempt to close property with area
  opened at byte 2608, line 66
  closed at byte 2872, line 73
  attributes at open: {}
  text around open: "ip>\n  </property>\n  <property>\n    <acre"
  text around close: ">SF City Limits SW-S</area>\n    <bathroo"

These warnings are essentially harmless, but they are very irritating, especially when thousands of them scroll by every time you run your tests. Why do they occur? Because assert_select is parsing the content as HTML, and HTML has several tags that are automatically closed:

• img
• br
• hr
• link
• meta
• area
• base
• basefont
• col
• frame
• input
• isindex
• param

As it turns out, Rails’ HTML scanner has the ability to parse as XHTML which mostly solves these warnings. Jamis outlines has outlined a user-level solution, but I didn’t find that unti l had already analyzed and come up with my own solution to the problem.

I just submitted a patch that automatically sets the parsing method based on the contents of the ContentType (ie. response.content_type). Hopefully this patch will be accepted and we won’t have to hack around the issue anymore.