More Helper Specs

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A long softball game (8 walks an inning was typical), precludes me from making much progress tonight. Nevertheless I must offer up some work to the gods of #mychain, lest they take offense and smite me.

As fate would have it, I left off last night with some fairly simple helper specs pending implementation. So let's implement...

First up is that the wiki helper should convert textile to HTML. To specify this, I use an example of some very simple textile, which should be converted to HTML. The RedCloth library can take care of the full specification, I am only interested in specifying that it quacks like a textile converter:

  it "should convert textile to HTML" do
    textile = <<_TEXTILE
paragraph 1 *bold text*

paragraph 2
_TEXTILE

    wiki(textile).
      should have_selector("p", :content => "paragraph 1 bold text") do |p|
      p.should have_selector("strong", :content => "bold text")
    end
  end

Implementation of that is as easy as wrapping the wiki method around a RedCloth call:

    def wiki(text)
      RedCloth.new(text).to_html
    end

Next up is that the wiki call should wikify temperatures, which can be specified as:

  it "should wikify temperatures" do
    wiki("250F").should contain("250° F")
  end

This can be implemented as:

    def wiki(original)
      text = original.dup
      text.gsub!(/\b(\d+)F/, "\\1° F")
      RedCloth.new(text).to_html
    end

Seeing this capricious use of gsub immediately makes me think of the Eigenclass class article on markdown conversion.

I am doing bad things.
I am doing bad things.
I am doing bad things.

But, I must not prematurely optimize. If this does cost me in performance, I will deal with it later.

Staying focused on implementation rather than optimization, I move on to writing the example for wikifying kid's nicknames:

  it "should wikify kids names" do
    self.stub!(:kid_nicknames).
      and_return({"marsha" => "the oldest Brady girl"})

    wiki("[kid:marsha]").should contain("the oldest Brady girl")
  end

Implementing the code to make this example pass is a simple matter of another gsub:

    def wiki(original)
      text = original.dup
      text.gsub!(/\b(\d+)F/, "\\1° F")
      text.gsub!(/\[kid:(\w+)\]/m) { |kid| kid_nicknames[$1] }
      RedCloth.new(text).to_html
    end

    def kid_nicknames
      { }
    end

There is still the matter of how to populate the kid_nicknames method. Hard-coding it will not do—there is not much point in obfuscating names if I make them publicly accessible elsewhere. I either need to make it a YAML configuration file or store it in CouchDB. I think I will ultimately choose to store it in CouchDB since that is easier to update (most days I think I have enough kids already, but you never know).

Since implementation will have to wait for tomorrow, I leave myself a note:

  it "should lookup kid nicknames in CouchDB"

and call it a day.
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