Is there any commonly used way to test RSS feeds and/or XML output? I have done my research and found those two links
http://lists.rubyonrails.org/pipermail/rails/2006-August/062267.html
My first attempts were to use assert_tag directly. I knew the response body wouldn't be XHTML, but thought the parser would deal happily with well-formed XML. It turns out it doesn't.
It seems to not like the <link> tag that is mandatory in RSS 2.0. The message I get is something along the lines of 'ignoring attempt to close channel with link', but the XML _is_ well formed.
The guy on the message and blog post above proposes a solution to another problem (namely asserting against other XML data sources) and it doesn't seem to apply to mine. I have no problem with asserting against the response body only, but I need to use a parser that recognizes RSS or at least XML.
Before I proceed to write my assertions using some XML processing lib, I need to ask how are you guys testing your RSS feeds?
Cheers,
Thiago Arrais