Cypress 'expect' with 'regex' fails to validate on second occurrence.

Current behavior

Steps to reproduce:

1. Read a text from any web page.
2. Use expect to match a regex.
3. Now, read the same data from the web page again.
4. Use expect to match a regex.

Actual result: Validation passes the first time but the same validation fails the second time.

Desired behavior

The validation should pass each time if the condition is satisfied or report the appropriate failure if the condition fails.

Test code to reproduce

/* eslint-disable cypress/no-unnecessary-waiting */
/* eslint-disable no-unused-vars */
/// <reference types="Cypress" />

it("Testing Table Validation", () => {
    let regex = /Germany|UK/gm;
    cy.visit("https://www.w3schools.com/html/html_tables.asp");
    cy.get("table[id='customers'] tbody tr:nth-child(2) td:nth-child(3)")
      .then(element => {
          cy.log(element.text());
          expect(element.text()).to.match(regex); // This validation works fine.
      });

    cy.wait(2000);
    cy.get("table[id='customers'] tbody tr:nth-child(2) td:nth-child(3)")
      .then(element => {
          cy.log(element.text());
          expect(element.text()).to.match(regex); // This validation fails.
      });
});

Cypress Version

8.5.0

Other

Am I doing something wrong here? The same scenario works if I use should instead of expect.

[chrisbreiding]

I’m going to close this as there’s a solution and I don’t think we should interfere in the behavior of regular expressions for this case. It’s really more of an issue with JavaScript itself and not Cypress, similar to needing to do a deep comparison for two object references (e.g. expect({}).to.equal({}) vs expect({}).to.deep.equal({})).

[praveentata]

Thanks Chris. That makes it clear.