RegEx is matched even though it shouldn't be

[cyuanli]

Hi everyone,

I'm rather new to Pact and still learning about its inner workings, so I'm not sure if I'm reporting this in the right repository. The issue I get is the following:

MISSION_e74c7e876e9a3f29f25068929085 is matched with ^[0-9a-zA-Z-]+ even though I forgot to specify the underscore in the string. Removing the capital letters (^[0-9a-z]+) fails the test, as expected:

     Failure/Error: expect(actual_contents).to match_term expected_contents, diff_options, example
     
       Actual: {"missionId":{"id":"MISSION_e74c7e876e9a3f29f25068929085"}}
     
       Diff
       --------------------------------------
       Key: - is expected 
            + is actual 
       Matching keys and values are not shown
       
        {
          "missionId": {
       -    "id": /^[0-9a-z]+/
       +    "id": "MISSION_e74c7e876e9a3f29f25068929085"
          }
        }

But for ^[0-9a-zA-Z-]+ it passes.

[YOU54F]

The error from Pact is correct, your regex, doesn't care about the underscore, its gets a match for MISSION

You can test it on https://regex101.com/

[cyuanli]

This seems like unintuitive behavior, passing the test if only a substring is matched. If I wanted to check a string for only containing alphanumeric characters, it would pass as long as the first character is a letter or digit? Is there a way of changing it such that the whole string needs to be matched?

Edit: figured it out, using $ works

[YOU54F]

You need to update your regex to not be so liberal, you can use the link provided to test it out in a playground 👍🏾