Method names in Higher Order Methods error messages

[ncphillips]

One of the things I miss from rspec is the additional context they provide around test failures.

How things are

Pest

Currently in Pest, I only see the value I expected and the value I received. Sometimes this is enough, but there are scenarios where the error message alone isn't really enough to understand what went wrong.

For example, if I have this test:

class User
{
    public function active()
    {
        return false;
    }
}

it("is active", function () {
    expect(new User)->active()->toBeTrue();
});

The only error message I receive is:

Failed asserting that false is true.

While this is technically correct, it doesn't paint a broad picture.

Screenshots

Granted, this is maybe more of a PHPStorm integeration issue. When running Pest directly via the command there is more context provided:

Rspec

Still, if we write the same test in Ruby/Rspec

class User
  def active?
    false
  end
end

it "is active" do
  expect(User.new).to be_active
end

Then we get quite a bit more output in Rubymine

expected `#<User:0x00000001062e56d8>.active?` to be truthy, got false

  0) User is active
     Failure/Error: expect(User.new).to be_active
       expected `#<User:0x00000001062e56d8>.active?` to be truthy, got false

Here we can see:

• The test name
• The actual expectation being performed
• The instance id + called method

Rubymine Screenshot

Higher Order Methods

I'll highlight that this is particularly nice output for higher order methods.

Rather printing the value returned from the method, they print the name of the method that was called.

Note: this doesn't happen for regular assertions.

I wonder if this is possible with Pest, but I also wonder if we could take it further? Could we always print the name of the variable?

For example:

expect($falsehood)->toBe(true);

Would throw an error message like:

Expected $falsehood to be true but received false;