[Webtest] VerifyText: How to handle nbsp?

[John and Pip]

Hi All,

VerifyText does not work in the most intuitive way (from my non-techie point
of view). It is called verifyText not verifyHTML but it actually seems to do
the latter.

This is a particular problem for nbsp e.g. my page appears to say "Confirm
Password" but the HTML is actually "Confirm Password:".

If I put <verifyText text="Confirm Password:"/>  it fails but if I put the
horrible <verifyText text="Confirm&nbsp;Password:"/> it also fails! With the
result showing:
               <parameter name="taskName" value="verifyText"/>
               <parameter name="text" value="ConfirmPassword:"/>
               <result>
                   <failed duration="15"/>
               </result>

1) Is there a workaround that will let me handle nbsp somehow, perhaps
similar to the way I have to handle strings of text that have a word bolded
where I would put for example <verifyText text="&lt;b&gt;Check:&lt;/b&gt;
have you filled in all sections marked"/>?

2) Can anything be done to improve this, because verifyText is really the
key validation tool for beginners / non-techie users and this behaviour is
at best confusing. Hopefully I've just missed something (see note re web
site below). I think the ideal solution is for verifyText to strip out all
tags from the target and to replace all nbsp with a simple space before
comparison. I believe WebTest uses HTMLUnit which uses NekoHTML to convert
the html to xml, so I guess it would have to hook in here or just after this
process as the whole page would need to be converted into a true text
version if verifyText was to work the way I think it should...?

Any advice would be most appreciated.

regards,
       john