Project: Vcr 2.1.1

Publisher: VCR

Preserve Exact Body Bytes

@exclude-18

Some HTTP servers are not well-behaved and respond with invalid data: the response body may
not be encoded according to the encoding specified in the HTTP headers, or there may be bytes
that are invalid for the given encoding. The YAML and JSON serializers are not generally
designed to handle these cases gracefully, and you may get errors when the cassette is serialized
or deserialized. Also, the encoding may not be preserved when round-tripped through the
serializer.

VCR provides a configuration option to deal with cases like these. The preserve_exact_body_bytes
method accepts a block that VCR will use to determine if the body of the given request or response object
should be base64 encoded in order to preserve the bytes exactly as-is. VCR does not do this by
default, since base64-encoding the string removes the human readibility of the cassette.

Alternately, if you want to force an entire cassette to preserve the exact body bytes,
you can pass the :preserve_exact_body_bytes => true cassette option when inserting your
cassette.

Scenarios

Preserve exact bytes for response body with invalid encoding

Given

a file named "preserve.rb" with:

# encoding: utf-8
string = "abc \xFA"
puts "Valid encoding: #{string.valid_encoding?}"

start_sinatra_app(:port => 7777) do
  get('/') { string }
end

require 'vcr'

VCR.configure do |c|
  c.cassette_library_dir = 'cassettes'
  c.hook_into :fakeweb
  c.preserve_exact_body_bytes do |http_message|
    http_message.body.encoding.name == 'ASCII-8BIT' ||
    !http_message.body.valid_encoding?
  end
end

def make_request(label)
  puts
  puts label
  VCR.use_cassette('example', :serialize_with => :json) do
    body = Net::HTTP.get_response(URI("http://localhost:7777/")).body
    puts "Body: #{body.inspect}"
  end
end

make_request("Recording:")
make_request("Playback:")

When

I run ruby preserve.rb

Then

the output should contain exactly:

Valid encoding: false

Recording:
Body: "abc \xFA"

Playback:
Body: "abc \xFA"

And

the file "cassettes/example.json" should contain:

"body":{"encoding":"ASCII-8BIT","base64_string":"YWJjIPo=\n"}

Preserve exact bytes for cassette with `:preserve_exact_body_bytes` option

Given

a file named "preserve.rb" with:

start_sinatra_app(:port => 7777) do
  get('/') { "Hello World" }
end

require 'vcr'

VCR.configure do |c|
  c.cassette_library_dir = 'cassettes'
  c.hook_into :fakeweb
  c.default_cassette_options = { :serialize_with => :json }
end

VCR.use_cassette('preserve_bytes', :preserve_exact_body_bytes => true) do
  Net::HTTP.get_response(URI("http://localhost:7777/"))
end

VCR.use_cassette('dont_preserve_bytes') do
  Net::HTTP.get_response(URI("http://localhost:7777/"))
end

When

I run ruby preserve.rb

Then

the file "cassettes/preserve_bytes.json" should contain:

"body":{"encoding":"US-ASCII","base64_string":"SGVsbG8gV29ybGQ=\n"}

And

the file "cassettes/dont_preserve_bytes.json" should contain:

"body":{"encoding":"US-ASCII","string":"Hello World"}

Last published about 7 years ago by myronmarston.

Preserve Exact Body Bytes

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