How to seeInDatabase special characters \r and \n

Question

I have a legacy system which I'm implementing a new integrated feature. This feature is being developed under Laravel Framework and one of my tests relies on seeing a parsed email body inside the database.

    // Assert
    $this->seeInDatabase('ticket', ['title' => 'TDD', 'user_id' => $user->id])
        ->seeInDatabase('interaction', [
            'response' => 'message.\r\n',
            'user_id' => $user->id
        ]);

Problem is:

1) tests\Artisan\InboxTest::it_should_parse_valid_email_and_make_ticket
Unable to find row in database table [interaction] that matched 
attributes 
---> [{"response":"message.\\r\\n","user_id":12}].
Failed asserting that 0 is greater than 0.

Apparently, seeInDatabase escapes the backslashes and looks for message.\\\\r\\\\n , which it will never find because the information is actually message.\\r\\n .

I tried escaping it myself, but got the same result.

TL;DR : how do I get Laravel to see the characters in the database?

Answer 1

The trait:

InteractsWithDatabase

describes the seeInDatabase method:

protected function seeInDatabase($table, array $data, $connection = null)
{
    $database = $this->app->make('db');

    $connection = $connection ?: $database->getDefaultConnection();

    $count = $database->connection($connection)->table($table)->where($data)->count();

    $this->assertGreaterThan(0, $count, sprintf(
        'Unable to find row in database table [%s] that matched attributes [%s].', $table, json_encode($data)
    ));

    return $this;
}

As you can see, the where function works as it would normally without any data escaping. I would suggest adding a custom method in the trait that would deal with edge cases like yours. For example:

protected function seeResponseInDatabase($table, $response, $connection = null)
{
    $database = $this->app->make('db');

    $connection = $connection ?: $database->getDefaultConnection();

    $count = $database->connection($connection)->table($table)->where('response','like', '%' . $response . '%')->count();

    $this->assertGreaterThan(0, $count, sprintf(
        'Unable to find row in database table [%s] that matched attributes [%s].', $table, $response
    ));

    return $this;
}

So, instead of passing the array, just pass your expected response. Instead of going on this route first, I would actually dd the $data array of the seeInDatabase method just to make sure the data is passed to the where clause as intended.

Hope this gives you some idea to resolve your issue.