testing-library / testing-library/dom-testing-library
Highlight non-breaking whitespace in getByRole failure message
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- Dominant language
- JavaScript
- Stars
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Description
When using getByRole, represent non-breaking whitespace in failure output as , so that it's easier to diagnose the distinguish between " " and . This would be in the list below "here are the accessible roles" under the "name" output.
Motivation: Non-breaking whitespace is not collapsed into " " in the accname calculation. This is correct according to the ARIA spec, but is tricky to debug getByRole failures related to usage of non-breaking whitespace. See also #904
Alternatives considered
We considered a custom helper to automatically collapse whitespace, but that is harder to maintain and discover than having the behavior in the core library. Further, it does not actually represent end-user experience since the browser does not perform this collapsing automatically.
Contributor guide
First steps
- Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
- Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
- Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
- Open a pull request that references the issue number.
Research direction
Start at the getByRole failure-message path and inspect the output under “here are the accessible roles,” especially the “name” field. Trace the existing failure output behavior, then add coverage showing that non-breaking whitespace is represented as \u0026nbsp; so spaces and non-breaking spaces are distinguishable.
Written by the indexing model from the issue text.
Assessment
- Tech stack
- javascript
- Domain
- testing-qa
- Issue type
- Feature
- Difficulty
- 3/5
- Estimated time
- 1-2 days
- Activity status
- Stale
- Clarity
- Mostly clear
- Newbie friendliness
- 35/100