Robot Framework and RESTful APIs

Been awhile.  Yup, it has.  Just a short one this time, more to get something down that vexed me for a little bit.

Dealing with a RESTful API that returned JSON in the body to my Robot Framework test caused me no end of grief.  Since the response always came back with the following:

\xef\xbb\xbf{

        "account_organizations": [

Originally I thought, it's just a JSON response, I can deal with it.

Oh no.

Not at all.

Turns out what I was getting ended up being byte order markers that were messing up the JSON compare I was trying to do.  Knowing what I was to get back was one thing, comparing that with the body of the response was another thing since the byte order markers did not behave like a regular list as I thought it was.  This turned out to be a dict, since Robot Framework basically is Python we have to be Pythonic here.

So, treating that as a dict we get the 3rd index from the list:

${l_response_body[3:]}

THAT now pulls the right values for comparison.

I also run this against a make unicode Python library, just in case.  So in Robot I use the following to cover it all:

${l_response_body} Get Response Body

${l_decoded_body} = make_unicode        ${l_response_body[3:]}

So all is good with the world, for now.