Where can I put test data that is not part of a model?

Question

I want to test against a list of invalid email addresses. At the moment, they live in my setup method:

  def setup
    @invalid_email_addresses = [
      'plainaddress',
      '#@%^%#$@#$@#.com',
      '@domain.com',
      'Joe Smith <[email protected]>',
      'email.domain.com',
      'email@[email protected]',
      '[email protected]',
      '[email protected]',
      '[email protected]',
      'あいうえお@domain.com',
      '[email protected] (Joe Smith)',
      'email@domain',
      '[email protected]',
      '[email protected]',
      '[email protected]',
      '[email protected]'
    ]
  end

This makes the method rather long. I would like to move them to a yml file:

# test/fixtures/email_addresses.yml
invalid_email_addresses:
    - 'plainaddress'
    - '#@%^%#$@#$@#.com'
    - '@domain.com'
    - 'Joe Smith <[email protected]>'
    - 'email.domain.com'
    - 'email@[email protected]'
    - '[email protected]'
    - '[email protected]'
    - '[email protected]'
    - 'あいうえお@domain.com'
    - '[email protected] (Joe Smith)'
    - 'email@domain'
    - '[email protected]'
    - '[email protected]'
    - '[email protected]'
    - '[email protected]'

But that results in an error for each test:

ActiveRecord::Fixture::FormatError: fixture key is not a hash: /Users/stefan_edberg/Rails/tennis_app/test/fixtures/emaild_addresses.yml, keys: ["invalid_email_addresses"]

If not in fixtures, where should I put these email addresses?

Answer 1

The error shared itself conveys that there is some problem in parsing the YAML contents. I saved the following contents in a file test.yml on my Desktop

# test/fixtures/email_addresses.yml
invalid_email_addresses:
  - 'plainaddress'
  - '#@%^%#$@#$@#.com'
  - '@domain.com'
  - 'Joe Smith <[email protected]>'
  - 'email.domain.com'
  - 'email@[email protected]'
  - '[email protected]'
  - '[email protected]'
  - '[email protected]'
  - 'あいうえお@domain.com'
  - '[email protected] (Joe Smith)'
  - 'email@domain'
  - '[email protected]'
  - '[email protected]'
  - '[email protected]'
  - '[email protected]' 

and then tried loading it from irb and it successfully loaded:

Please Note: Initially when I copied the YAML contents as it is in my file and tried loading it, I encountered parsing error and then I removed the following entry and tried again and the parse was successful

- 'あいうえお@domain.com'`

That entry contains Unicode characters. As YAML is indentation-sensitive copying that entry as it is in my file made the indentation inconsistent which caused parse error. Fixing the indentation for that entry made the parse successful.