How to JUnit test that two List E contain the same elements in the same order

Question

Context  I am writing a simple JUnit test for the MyObject class   A MyObject can be created from a static factory method that takes a varargs of String   MyObject ofComponents  Uno    Dos    Tres      At any time during the existence of MyObject  clients can inspect the parameters it was created by in the form of a List lt E gt   through the  getComponents   method   myObject ofComponents       - gt  List lt String gt      Uno    Dos    Tres      In other words  a MyObject both remembers and exposes the list of parameters that brought it into existence  More details about this contract    The order of getComponents will be the same as the one chosen for object creation Duplicate subsequent String components are allowed and retained in order Behaviour on null is undefined  other code guarantees no null gets to the factory  There are no ways to alter the list of components after object instantiation   I am writing a simple test that creates a MyObject from a list of String and checks that it can return the same list via  getComponents    I do this immediately but this is supposed to happen at a distance in a realistic code path   Code  Here my attempt     List lt String gt  argumentComponents   Lists newArrayList  One    Two    Three    List lt String gt  returnedComponents       MyObject ofComponents          argumentComponents toArray new String argumentComponents size               getComponents    assertTrue Iterables elementsEqual argumentComponents  returnedComponents        Question   Is Google Guava Iterables elementsEqual   the best way  provided I have the library in my build path  to compare those two lists  this is something I have been agonizing about  should I use this helper method which goes over an Iterable lt E gt    check size and then iterate running  equals     or any other of the methods that an Internet search suggests  what s the canonical way to compare lists for unit tests    Optional insights I would love to get   Is the method test designed reasonably  I am not an expert in JUnit  Is  toArray   the best way to convert a List lt E gt  to a varargs of E

User · Answer

My answer about whether Iterables elementsEqual is best choice    Iterables elementsEqual is enough to compare 2 Lists   Iterables elementsEqual is used in more general scenarios  It accepts more general types  Iterable  That is  you could even compare a List with a Set   by iterate order  it is important   Sure ArrayList and LinkedList define equals pretty good  you could call equals directly  While when you use a not well defined List  Iterables elementsEqual is the best choice  One thing should be noticed  Iterables elementsEqual does not accept null   To convert List to array  Iterables toArray is easer  For unit test  I recommend add empty list to your test case

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For excellent code-readability  Fest Assertions has nice support for asserting lists  So in this case  something like   Assertions assertThat returnedComponents  containsExactly  One    Two    Three      Or make the expected list to an array  but I prefer the above approach because it s more clear   Assertions assertThat returnedComponents  containsExactly argumentComponents toArray

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assertTrue   assertFalse     to use only to assert boolean result returned     assertTrue Iterables elementsEqual argumentComponents    returnedComponents      You want to use Assert assertTrue   or Assert assertFalse   as the method under test returns a boolean value  As the method returns a specific thing such as a List that should contain some expected elements  asserting with assertTrue   in this way   Assert assertTrue myActualList containsAll myExpectedList   is an anti pattern  It makes the assertion easy to write but as the test fails  it also makes it hard to debug because the test runner will only say to you something like        expected true but actual is false   Assert assertEquals Object  Object  in JUnit4 or Assertions assertIterableEquals Iterable  Iterable  in JUnit 5   to use only as both equals   and toString   are overrided for the classes  and deeply  of the compared objects     It matters because the equality test in the assertion relies on equals   and the test failure message relies on toString   of the compared objects  As String overrides both equals   and toString    it is perfectly valid to assert the List lt String gt  with  assertEquals Object Object   And about this matter   you have to override equals   in a class because it makes sense in terms of object equality  not only to make assertions easier in a test with JUnit  To make assertions easier you have other ways  that you can see in the next points of the answer       Is Guava a way to perform build unit test assertions       Is Google Guava Iterables elementsEqual   the best way  provided I have the library in my build path  to compare those two lists      No it is not  Guava is not an library to write unit test assertions  You don t need it to write most  all I think  of unit tests     What s the canonical way to compare lists for unit tests   As a good practice I favor assertion matcher libraries      I cannot encourage JUnit to perform specific assertions because this provides really too few and limited features   it performs only an assertion with a deep equals  Sometimes you want to allow any order in the elements  sometimes you want to allow that any elements of the expected match with the actual  and so for     So using a unit test assertion matcher library such as Hamcrest or AssertJ is the correct way  The actual answer provides a Hamcrest solution  Here is a AssertJ solution     org assertj core api ListAssert containsExactly   is what you need   it verifies that the actual group contains exactly the given values and nothing else  in order as stated        Verifies that the actual group contains exactly the given values and   nothing else  in order    Your test could look like    import org assertj core api Assertions  import org junit jupiter api Test    Test void ofComponent AssertJ   throws Exception      MyObject myObject   MyObject ofComponents  One    Two    Three       Assertions assertThat myObject getComponents                  containsExactly  One    Two    Three        A AssertJ  good point is that declaring a List as expected is needless   it makes the assertion straighter and the code more readable    Assertions assertThat myObject getComponents              containsExactly  One    Two    Three      And if the test fails        Fail   Three was not expected  Assertions assertThat myObject getComponents               containsExactly  One    Two      you get a very clear message such as       java lang AssertionError       Expecting        lt   One    Two    Three         to contain exactly  and in same order         lt   One    Two         but some elements were not expected        lt   Three      Assertion matcher libraries are a must because these will really further     Suppose that MyObject doesn t store Strings but Foos instances such as    public class MyFooObject        private List lt Foo gt  values       SafeVarargs     public static MyFooObject ofComponents Foo    values                              public List lt Foo gt  getComponents            return new ArrayList lt  gt  values             That is a very common need   With AssertJ the assertion is still simple to write  Better you can assert that the list content are equal even if the class of the elements doesn t override equals   hashCode   while JUnit ways require that    import org assertj core api Assertions  import static org assertj core groups Tuple tuple  import org junit jupiter api Test    Test void ofComponent   throws Exception       MyFooObject myObject   MyFooObject ofComponents new Foo 1   One    new Foo 2   Two    new Foo 3   Three          Assertions assertThat myObject getComponents                   extracting Foo  getId  Foo  getName                 containsExactly tuple 1   One                                   tuple 2   Two                                   tuple 3   Three

User · Answer

org junit Assert assertEquals   and org junit Assert assertArrayEquals   do the job   To avoid next questions  If you want to ignore the order put all elements to set and then compare  Assert assertEquals new HashSet lt String gt  one   new HashSet lt String gt  two    If however you just want to ignore duplicates but preserve the order wrap you list with LinkedHashSet   Yet another tip   The trick Assert assertEquals new HashSet lt String gt  one   new HashSet lt String gt  two   works fine until the comparison fails  In this case it shows you error message with to  string representations of your sets that can be confusing because the order in set is almost not predictable  at least for complex objects   So  the trick I found is to wrap the collection with sorted set instead of HashSet  You can use TreeSet with custom comparator

User · Answer

The equals   method on your List implementation should do elementwise comparison  so   assertEquals argumentComponents  returnedComponents     is a lot easier

User · Answer

Why not simply use List equals   assertEquals argumentComponents  imapPathComponents     Contract of List equals      two lists are defined to be equal if they contain the same elements in the same order

User · Answer

I prefer using Hamcrest because it gives much better output in case of a failure  Assert assertThat listUnderTest          IsIterableContainingInOrder contains expectedList toArray        Instead of reporting   expected true  got false   it will report   expected List containing  1  2  3       got list containing  4  6  2        IsIterableContainingInOrder contain  Hamcrest  According to the Javadoc       Creates a matcher for Iterables that matches when a single pass over the examined Iterable yields a series of items  each logically equal to the corresponding item in the specified items  For a positive match  the examined iterable must be of the same length as the number of specified items   So the listUnderTest must have the same number of elements and each element must match the expected values in order

[java] How to JUnit test that two List<E> contain the same elements in the same order?

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