Matt at Keyboard Writes Code

A blog about software development, technology and other things that interest me

New Release: json-array-diff

January 16, 2015 — Matt Forrester

For most of my working life I've been doing RDD (refresh driven development) but in the last 3-4 years I've been using more and more TDD. It's got to the point that pretty much all functionality new that I write is written using TDD, life is sooooooo much better but recently I've found myself staring at big JSON documents trying to figure out why expected is not equal to result four levels deep. This is not fun and it's also not a good use of time so I decided that I needed to come up with a solution...

I created a little bash script called json-array-diff. The code itself is shown below:

#!/bin/bash
[ $# -ge 1 -a -f "$1" ] && input="$1" || input="-"
JSON=$(cat $input | grep 'DIFFTHIS: ' | sed 's/.*DIFFTHIS\:\s*\[/[/')

JSONA=$(echo $JSON | jq -S ".[0]" > /tmp/${USER}-a.json)
JSONB=$(echo $JSON | jq -S ".[1]" > /tmp/${USER}-b.json)

meld /tmp/${USER}-a.json /tmp/${USER}-b.json

This horrid bash code takes the input from STDIN and looks for the text 'DIFFTHIS: ' within it and then uses sed to remove it... as long as the next non-whitespace character is a '['. Why before a '['? Well the text from 'DIFFTHIS: ' until the end of the line is intended to be a JSON document including the expected and actual results. Next we use jq to rip the first and second elements from that array and write them to temporary files in /tmp and finally use meld (my preferred diffing program) to show the differences between the two files.

This give me the not-perfect but far better workflow of:

  1. Write a new test.
  2. It fails.
  3. Hack away on code till I get something that looks like it might just work.
  4. It spews out 4K of JSON data which I can't diff with my eyes.
  5. Swear.
  6. Add the text snippet console.log("DIFFTHIS: ", JSON.stringify([expected, result])) to my test just above the failing line.
  7. Re-run test
  8. meld pops up making it super easy for me to spot the error.
  9. Fix the code, it's easy now I know what I messed up!

You can download the script https://github.com/forbesmyester/provisioning-common/blob/master/roles/terminal_developer/files/scripts/json-array-diff hope it stops you staring :-)