How do I test for an exact Exception message, rather than a substring, with PHPUnit?

Question

According to the PHPUnit Documentation on @expectedExceptionMessage, the string must only be a substring of the actual Exception thrown.

In

Answer 1

When this question was posted, PHPUnit v3.7 didn't have a solution to this problem. Newer versions have a new @expectedExceptionMessageRegExp option that you can use to add a regular expression to match the exception message against.

Your case, using ^ and $ to force the string to be exactly what is expected, could look like this:

/**
 * @expectedException \Exception
 * @expectedExceptionMessageRegExp /^a < b\.$/
 */
public function testValues_ALessBOnly()
{
    $myClass = new MyClass()
    $myClass->validate(1, 2, 4, 3);
}