Compare scala.xml.Elem object in unit test

Question

I have two scala.xml.Elem objects (actual, expected). I am using JUnit 4, but have also included XMLUnit 1.3.

Is there any easy way to compare the two objec

Answer 1

The earlier answers were helpful to me, though I found that sometimes I wanted to check a larger chunk of XML and the failure comparison showing both chunks of XML was a bit hard to read. This method will try to recurse down into child elements first to compare those, so if a deeply nested element is incorrect it will show a much more concise error. Depending on your XML this might not give you enough context to work out where it's actually failing, but I find it useful.

/** Check that the XMLs are the same, ignoring empty text nodes (whitespace). */
private def assertEqual(actual: xml.Node, expected: xml.Node) {

    def recurse(actual: xml.Node, expected: xml.Node) {
        // depth-first checks, to get specific failures
        for ((actualChild, expectedChild) <- actual.child zip expected.child) {
            recurse(actualChild, expectedChild)
        }
        actual should be (expected)
    }

    recurse(scala.xml.Utility.trim(actual), scala.xml.Utility.trim(expected))

}