From: Jonathan Kohl <kohljonathan@...>
Date: 2005-03-19T09:04:54+09:00
Subject: Re: Advice on ASCII representation of objects for testing using string compares?

Thanks. I Iooked at YAML, but given that the input files are XML it
seemed like a lot of markup.

The two areas that are not causing failures are in XML tag contents of
the first two entries in the XML file. If I run a diff, it says the
binary files are different, but the string compare and checksums are
identical. If I change the contents between tags or the tags after the
first two, it will fail as expected. This seems really odd. Using REXML
appealed to me because if the tags are malformed it will catch it when
it reads the file.

In the mean time, I discovered:
read(_filename_)" which reads the contents of a file (_filename_) in as
a string. I can read in both XML files (known good, and one from test
system) as strings, do a compare:
a == b and it seems to work. If this is the case, was my usage of
marshal to serialize the file contents into a string complete overkill?