How do you unit test if two jagged arrays are equal?

Question

I have a function that manually extracts a date.

[TestMethod]
public void TestRemoveTwoDates()
{
    String test = "at 06/2/2012 to 12/10/2012";
    int[][] actual = String_Parser.RemoveTwoDates(test, "to");
    int[][] expected = new int[2][];
    expected[0] = new int[3] { 6, 2, 2012 };
    expected[1] = new int[3] { 12, 10, 2012 };

    CollectionAssert.AreEqual(expected, actual);
}

P.S. Browsing through SO, I realized it isn't good practice to return arrays as they are mutable. But I still wanna know how i can test this other than using a loop to Assert Each element in the array.

Sidenote: Here's a much simpler way to populate the expected value: `var expected = new[] { new[] { 6, 2, 2012 }, new[] { 12, 10, 2012 } };`. — Marcelo Cantos, Nov 02 '12 at 06:08
Technically, what you have is an array of arrays, or a jagged array, not a 2D array. A 2D array would be `int[,]`. — David Yaw, Nov 02 '12 at 06:25

score 4 · Accepted Answer · edited Nov 22 '17 at 01:59

Since you cannot use the Hashcode which uses the reference rather than the content of an array, the way to go would be to iterate all values in a nested loop, compare value by value (as in stackoverflow.com/questions/2893297/iterate-multi-dimensional-array-with-nested-foreach-statement), use a boolean which you set to false at the first mismatch, and assert that this boolean is true in your unit test.

score 0 · Answer 2 · edited Sep 10 '19 at 22:19

0

look at Collection section in https://fluentassertions.com/introduction, it may help you

edited Sep 10 '19 at 22:19

ZAD-Man

1,328
23
42

answered Nov 02 '12 at 06:40

Sergii Bidnyi

306
1
7

9

The link doesn't work. This is a perfect example of why link-only answers are discouraged. – meustrus Dec 10 '14 at 21:20

How do you unit test if two jagged arrays are equal?

2 Answers2

Linked