Collapse whitespace issue with  

Had an issue that stemmed from Cypress testing library but debugged into Dom testing library. The issue is this function.

When searching for text with a non breaking space such as “٤ UK£”, the regex replaces the nbsp into a space. It’s fairly obvious why the regex was used, but it’s effectively converting all types of spaces into a “regular space”. This then causes the text match to fail.

In my opinion, that’s an unintentional side effect of collapseWhitespace.

[astorije]

I’m getting a similar issue with non-breaking spaces and I can’t seem to find a way to target them easily. This is what I have tried:

test('non-breaking space', () => {
  render(<div>&nbsp;</div>);

  // None of the following pass:
  expect(screen.getByText(' ')).toBeInTheDocument(); // Regular space
  expect(screen.getByText(' ')).toBeInTheDocument(); // Non-breaking space
  expect(screen.getByText(/ /)).toBeInTheDocument(); // Regular space
  expect(screen.getByText(/ /)).toBeInTheDocument(); // Non-breaking space
  expect(screen.getByText(/\u00a0/)).toBeInTheDocument();
  expect(screen.getByText('&nbsp;')).toBeInTheDocument();
  expect(screen.getByText(/&nbsp;/)).toBeInTheDocument();
});

I have not tried using a custom text matcher function or a custom normalizer, but I feel like there is probably an easy built-in way to do this without going too crazy on customizations. Any ideas?

[herecydev]

I absoutely can try, there doesn’t seem to be a way to configure this globally though (I have to do this in many places). Is that something that you could see being added?

I’m not sure I agree with the docs here:

By default, normalization consists of trimming whitespace from the start and end of text, and collapsing multiple adjacent whitespace characters into a single space.

Consider the following " a b ". I would expect the first and last spaces to be removed but there are no “multiple adjacent whitespace characters”. So the inner space (non breaking) should have been preserved.

I’m using the Intl.NumberFormat in my application which is outputting that nbsp, and then in Cypress I’m querying for that text which is highlighting that mismatch. Would the default normalizer benefit from collapsing multiple spaces but preserving the “type of space”?

Alternatively, should the same normalization be applied to the textContent?