Cucumber scenario searching in a file using ruby - file-io

Question

I have a cucumber scenario which checks for certain strings in a file. Not a very ideal way of doing things but it has been deemed an absolute need.
My Cucumber scenario which has a table:
And the email should have
|search_string|
|Nokogiri |
|Cucumber |
|White Tiger |
My Step definition
Given /^the email should have$/ do |table|
table.hashes.each do |hash|
check_email(hash["search_string"])
end
end
My check_email method
require 'nokogiri'
def check_email(search_string)
htmlFile = File.open(filename).read
doc = Nokogiri::HTML::DocumentFragment.parse(htmlFile)
if (doc.content["#{search_string}"])
puts true
return true
end
htmlFile.close
puts false
return false
end
The file I am reading although is ".txt" file extension the contents in the file are in HTML format.
The method is reading the correct file
The file has the contents that the method is trying to locate
Now to the actual problem that I am seeing.
The search_string in my cucumber scenario has 3 values to be searched. "White Tiger" is not there in the file
Since "White Tiger" is not in the file the test should fail, but instead the test passes / I should say I see "green" and when I output the actual results as above in the code it clearly shows (true for Nokogiri, true for Cucumber and false for White Tiger).
My question is so how can I do this. Cucumber table results should show GREEN/PASS only for values that are available in the file and RED/FAIL for values not in the file.
Can someone please help me with this. Appreciate in advance.

Answer 1

Cucumber won't fail a step unless an exception is raised (this is what happens when an RSpec matcher is not satisfied). Simply returning true or false is meaningless.
Your assertion should probably look something like
if (!doc.content["#{search_string}"])
raise "Expected the file to contain '#{search_string}'"
end

Answer 2

If you want to use your check_email function as is, you can add an assertion to your step definition:
Given /^the email should have$/ do |table|
table.hashes.each do |hash|
check_email(hash["search_string"]).should be_true
end
end
You could also just make your e-mail function return a string, and check its contents in your step definition:
require 'nokogiri'
def email_contents
html = IO.read(filename)
doc = Nokogiri::HTML::DocumentFragment.parse(html)
return doc.content
end
# ...
Given /^the email should have$/ do |table|
contents = email_contents
table.hashes.each do |hash|
contents.should include(hash["search_string"])
end
end
These aren't better or worse than Jon M's approach--just another alternative.