Possible to get table cell strings with leading/trailing spaces?

The OSRM route engine uses tables to define small ‘maps’ of node locations used in tests, ie:

            |   |   | a |   |   |
            |   |   | b |   |   |
            | d | c |   | g | h |
            |   |   | e |   |   |
            |   |   | f |   |   |

The horizontal and vertical position of nodes are translated to latitude and longitude. This might be a somewhat unusual use of tables, but it’s very useful.

To make the maps easier to read I would like simplify the syntax to:

            |     a     |
            |     b     |
            | d c   g h |
            |     e     |
            |     f     |

However cucumber strips leading (and trailing) spaces from the cell strings, ie. " a " is returned as “a”, which breaks the horizontal positions.

Is there any way to get the raw strings including the leading spaces?

I guess we could quote all lines, but this is awkward. I looked at transforms, but it seems cucumber js doesn’t implement it, and anyways I’m not sure it would solve the problem?

Thanks!

[charlierudolph]

It appears that trimming of trailing and leading whitespace is done by gherkin and as far as I can tell there is no way to ask gherkin to preserve them. You could open an issue on gherkin if you would like.

I believe transforms are mostly for capture groups in regular expressions, though cucumber-ruby has data table transforms. That would start with the data gherkin parses though, so you would have already lost the leading and trailing spaces.

If all you want is the example you gave, you could try using doc strings.

Given my map
  """
      a     
      b     
  d c   g h 
      e    
      f    
  """

[lock[bot]]

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