Allow the alternation operator to be escaped

[mitchgrout]

🤔 What's the problem you're trying to solve?

It appears that the only way to have a literal / within a step requires the use of a regex, to avoid the step being interpreted as an alternation. For example, if I wanted to have:

When I do an A/B test

...I might intuitively write the following steps:

When "I do an A/B test"

However, this gets interpreted as alternation, so we end up with the equivalent

When /^I do an (A|B) test$/

Seemingly a \ does not do anything here, so I have to fall back to a regex match:

When /^I do an A\/B test$/`

...which just makes things look more complicated than they really are.

✨ What's your proposed solution?

Escaping the / feels like the best choice, although it does result in very ugly steps:

When 'I do an A\/B test'

An alternative could be to re-use / as the escape here, for example:

When "I do an A//B test"`

...or for languages which support annotation / keyword-arguments, the ability to simply disable expression parsing:

When "I do an A/B test", as_expression: false

⛏ Have you considered any alternatives or workarounds?

Falling back to regexp is a simple enough workaround, and hoisting the /-containing term to a ParameterType also fixes the problem. However, given that there are escapes for {} and (), it feels natural that / should too.

📚 Any additional context?

cucumber (8.0.0)
cucumber-core (11.0.0)
cucumber-cucumber-expressions (15.2.0)

[mpkorstanje]

The Cucumber expression I do an A\/B test is already valid and should match I do an A/B test literally. We also have a test case for it. Now, I assume you're using Cucumber Ruby? If so, can you try to reproduce with the latest versions?

[mitchgrout]

Looks like I didn't read the escaping section closely enough. I had a failing dynamic step which only started failing after introducing a / and seemingly no additional escaping was helping, but it looks like it was an error on my part.