This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Ruby Buzz by Francis Hwang. Original Post: json-deep-compare Feed Title: Francis Hwang's site: ruby Feed URL: http://fhwang.net/syndicate/ruby.atom Feed Description: Author & artist Francis Hwang's personal site. Latest Ruby Buzz Posts Latest Ruby Buzz Posts by Francis Hwang Latest Posts From Francis Hwang's site: ruby

For a recent consulting project, I found myself comparing a lot of large JSON documents in tests, which can be frustrating since differences don't show up well when comparing the hashes normally. Hence json-deep-compare, a Ruby gem for comparing large JSON documents and showing the most specific points of difference if they are unequal.

Let's say you've got a test case:

class MyTest
  include JsonDeepCompare::Assertions

  def test_comparison
    left_value = {
      'total_rows' => 2,
      'rows' => [
        {
          'id' => 'foo',
          'doc' => {
            '_id' => 'foo', 'title' => 'Foo', 'sub_document' => { 'one' => 'two' }
          }
        }
      ]
    }
    right_value = {
      'total_rows' => 2,
      'rows' => [
        {
          'id' => 'foo',
          'doc' => {
            '_id' => 'foo', 'title' => 'Foo', 'sub_document' => { 'one' => '1' }
          }
        }
      ]
    }
    assert_json_equal(left_value, right_value)
  end
end

Running it will output this error:

RuntimeError: ":root > .rows :nth-child(1) > .doc > .sub_document > .one" expected to be "two" but was "1"

The selector syntax uses a limited subset of JSONSelect to describe where to find the differences.