Details
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Type:
Improvement
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Status:
Open
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Priority:
Major
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Resolution: Unresolved
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Affects Version/s: 2.5
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Fix Version/s: None
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Component/s: Core
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Labels:None
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Number of attachments :
Description
The biggest sore point for my team are the greedy reg-ex matchers for step prose.
This was somewhat solved in another ticket which added a priority field to the annotation.
However, this does not scale well with a large amount of steps. It's unmanageable, and a bit ugly, to have to worry about a global priority number.
This problem would be best fixed if the reg-ex matcher was simply non-greedy. A usable solution, I think, would be to provide a configuration option in the StepsConfiguration to enable this.
(On a side note, you may want to consider moving to a feature rich templating language like velocity).
Activity
I would consider any dependency on the greedy matching to be broken. It makes no sense at all, because it essentially hides other steps - when would anyone ever depend on this? Keeping it for backwards compatibility is non-sensical and just causes pain.
For example, if I created this step:
@Given("$anything") public void anything(String anAnything) {}
It will hide every single other step in my tests. How is this useful? Remove the greedy qualifier or give us a config option. Please 
. This single issue makes me dislike jbehave more and more every time I have to waste effort on it.
James Ravn
added a comment - I would consider any dependency on the greedy matching to be broken. It makes no sense at all, because it essentially hides other steps - when would anyone ever depend on this? Keeping it for backwards compatibility is non-sensical and just causes pain.
For example, if I created this step:
@Given( "$anything" ) public void anything( String anAnything) {}
It will hide every single other step in my tests. How is this useful? Remove the greedy qualifier or give us a config option. Please . This single issue makes me dislike jbehave more and more every time I have to waste effort on it. The prioritisation strategy is now configurable in 3.x: http://jbehave.org/reference/latest/prioritising-steps.html
Mauro Talevi
added a comment - The prioritisation strategy is now configurable in 3.x: http://jbehave.org/reference/latest/prioritising-steps.html 
+1
I don't use jBehave in anger (however, I do use other tool that is very similar and I would like to move to jbehave). I cannot imagine a use case when I want the regexp groups to be greedy. Again, I'm a newbie so don't listen to me too much...