Cypress test: is .contains() equivalent to should('contain')?

Question

Is this: cy.get(\'[name=planSelect]\').contains(dummyPlan)

equivalent to this: cy.get(\'[name=planSelect]\').should(\'contain\', dummyPlan)

Answer 1

Answer

• .contains(selector, content) is the best selector; it retries element selection AND allows text matching (not just .class #id [attributes])

• .should() is just an assertion and only the assertion is retried (not the element selection)

.should('exist') is implied unless you specify your own -- this is how they allowed .should('not.exist')

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Tangent

Browsers support XPath 1.0 which is a pretty cool but obscure way to make complex queries based on DOM tree traversal. There's a contains predicate function:

//*[         contains(normalize-space(.), 'The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.') ]
   [not(.//*[contains(normalize-space(.), 'The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.') ])]

This searches from root of the document for any node that contains the text and doesn't contain a descendant node which contains the text. You can test it in the console:

$x("//*[contains(normalize-space(.), 'The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.')][not(.//*[contains(normalize-space(.), 'The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.') ])]")