String Date Compare

Question

In an BDD test I am comparing dates. When Comparing the dates are in strings. Even thought both the dates are same I get this message and the test fails

Expected object to be "01/20/2012 12:00:00 AM", but found "1/20/2012 12:00:00 AM".

One more thing is this happens just on my system. If I ask another developer to run the test, the test passes fine. Is there a setting of some type that I am missing?

The code part of it is

            customer["DateOfBirth"].Should().Be(Helper.DateOfBirth.ToString());

Where customer is a hash table. this particular statement passes OK on other machines but not mine.

I know I can fix it by changing to date compare instead of String compare. But I was curious, since this is fine on other machines.

Answer 1

In an BDD test I am comparing dates. When Comparing the dates are in strings.

That sounds like your problem then. My guess is that you're comparing a date formatted in the default culture to one which has been hand-formatted in some other culture.

The solution is to perform the comparison with DateTime values instead, rather than relying on formatted values. Allow the test runner to format both values if they're different.

Answer 2

The dates are being formatted differently -- one has a leading 0.

You should either format them the same, or just compare the actual DateTime values directly.