asterisks displaying instead of single quotes in Command Log assertion

Current behavior:

Command Log for assertion chain includes confusing asterisks. I suspect it may be replacing \n with **.

Even displays in passing tests

Desired behavior:

Error in Command Log should display as:

expected '<div.duration>' to have text '37:46', but the text was ' 37:46 '

Code to reproduce

cy.get(".duration").should("include.text", "37:46")

• Cypress Version: 2.0.3
• Browser Version: Crome

[srwiseman]

Hi, I’m new to contributing, but I don’t think the problem is specifically due to newlines. It’s the fact that the entire string itself is being processed as markdown. I don’t think that’s a good idea.

In this specific case, the issue is that markdown treats '** 37:46 **' as ** 37:46 **, not ’ 37:46 ’ It’s because in markdown, you can’t put a bold tag in front of white space.

However, this issue goes deeper than this.

Let’s say I’m looking to match _37:46_:

cy.get(".duration").should("include.text", "_37:46_")

Now we have italicized our test

Let’s take it to the extreme, let’s say we do this:

cy.get(".duration").should("include.text", "![cypress](https://www.cypress.io/img/logo-dark.4e8064a6.png)")

We get this:

Basically, if your tests include anything that can be parsed by markdown, it will. I have not looked at where specifically in the code these strings are being processed by markdown, but I think it should be avoided (or at least the contents of these strings should not be parsed at all).

Here’s another example of how this could be really confusing:

Let’s look for *37:46*:

cy.get(".duration").should("include.text", "*37:46*")

Now we get this:

This makes no sense at all since it’s saying that two identical strings don’t match. It should show exactly what it does further down:

My conclusion would be that these strings shouldn’t be parsed by markdown at all. It would also make sense to add quotes so that it would be more obvious why the two strings don’t match.

I’d be happy to investigate the code and make these changes, but I’d imagine a design change like this would have to be signed off by someone.

[cypress-bot[bot]]

Released in 3.7.0.