If new cucumber transform breaks everyhing …

After reading The cucumber book I decided to add clever cucumber transforms but steps started to fail all over the place … Even completly unrelated scenarios were failing …

I should have read the Cucumber transforms doc page and particularly the “Transforms wisdom” section before anything, it would have been a real time saver. To summarise, when a step is executed, all transforms regexps are tried on the step captures, and the first matching transform is applied ! Inlining the transform global inside the step regex removes duplication, but in no way does it imply which transform will be applied !

For example

CAPTURE_NUMBER = Transform /^.*$/ do |digits|
  Float(digits)
end

When /^I withdraw (#{CAPTURE_NUMBER}) from "([^"]+)"$/ do |amount, bank_name|
  bank = Bank.find_by_name(bank_name)
  bank.withdraw(amount)
end

will match the bank name with CAPTURE_NUMBER, and you’ll get an “invalid value for Float” error.

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