Allow leading and trailing spaces to be preserved in example table cells

Frank, what's the use case for keeping the spaces?

I'm using JBehave to test an Excel spreadsheet importer (used to import requirements defined in one tool into another). (Unfortunately, ) Users are allowed to have spaces in cells. Since the importer/parser identifies columns based on the name of their header cells, and since some header cells actually have leading/trailing spaces, it would be nice to be able to use the same names in example tables when defining test scenarios.

I could have a look at the implementation and see whether I could fix it myself. Mauro, any hint where to start looking would be very welcomed

Thanks,
Frank

It's actually trivial to not trim the table cells, but the real point is that most users would find that less useful or annoying to have to trim it themselves. We need to find a way to support multiple parsing modes, whist using the same parser (the ExamplesTable model class).

Some optional parsing meta info before the table data might do the trick, identified as anything in {} before first header separator. E.g.:

{trim=false}
| |A | B | C|
| |X | Y | Z|

Then we could also add other directives, e.g. for the default sorting of the data.

I think that usually users would indeed want trimming. So, turning it off on demand sounds good.

Please let me know if I can be of any help with implementing this...