Also posted to my use.perl journal and the Perl-QA list.

There are many times when we test string data but whitespace issues give us false negatives. For example, consider the following two SQL snippets:

CREATE TABLE foo (
  id INTEGER NOT NULL PRIMARY KEY,
  name VARCHAR(32) NOT NULL,
  age INTEGER
);
[download]

And:

create table foo (
  id INTEGER       NOT NULL PRIMARY KEY,
  name VARCHAR(32) NOT NULL,
  age integer
);
[download]

Those are functionally equivalent but there are a few potential problems with testing it. I can get a reasonably easy to debug test if I do the following:

• Collapse all unquoted whitespace to a single space.
• Preserve newlines (so that Test::Differences will still be meaningful)
• Lower-case all unquoted characters.

I can use Data::Record to easily split the string on spaces without affecting quoted characters:

use Regexp::Common;
use Data::Record;
my $record = Data::Record->new({
    split  => qr/\s\t/,
    unless => $RE{quoted},
});
my $data = join ' ', map { lc $_ } $record->records($data);
[download]

That doesn't seem flexible enough, though. It would be useful to wrap this in a test module whereby one can control whether or not one wants to alter the case, ignore quoted data, preseve newlines, and so on. I could make a plethora of test functions, but the number of possible combinations would make them unweildy. I could have the user set the parameters at the top of the test and change the parameters as needed. This would make this far more flexible than simply an SQL tester. Thoughts?

I'm thinking a name like Test::ControlWhitespace.

---

---

Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!

Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.

Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.

Please read these before you post! —

• How do I compose an effective node title?
• How do I post a question effectively?
• Markup in the Monastery

Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:

a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr

You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)

	For:		Use:
	&		&
	<		&lt;
	>		&gt;
	[		&#91;
	]		&#93;

Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?

See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.