PHPUnit, asserting html content

Question

Which is the best way to assert with phpunit certain content in html strings?

In Zend applications there are a buch of assertions assertQuery* available. But if you are not in a Zend application? assertXml* doesn't look to be appropiate.

For instance, how would you assert that the tag <div ... id="myId" ...>...</div> exists in $htmlString taking into account that changing the position of the id attribute wouldn't fail the test?

Answer 1

I suggest that you parse the HTML string using some library, and then use the library API for writing assertions.

There are lots of good HTML/XML parsers, for example:

http://symfony.com/doc/current/components/dom_crawler.html

Using this you can access any desired node by using CSS selectors, xpath, etc, and you can check if an attribute exists independently of it's position.

$crawler = new Crawler($html);
$this->assertEquals(1, $crawler->filter('div#elementId')->count());

You could also write a custom assertion that automates this process so that the assertion would be:

$this->assertHtmlContainsSelector($html, 'div#elementId');