Let an empty body satisfy a body assertion - #79

Problem

--assert-body-eq '' could never pass, and the failure said so in a way that refuted itself.

Both --assert-body-eq and --assert-body checked whether the body was empty before checking what had been asked of them:

$ http-assert --assert-body-eq '' http://…/empty     # a 204
- body: expected "", missing

The empty string is not missing — it is exactly what was asked for. So a 204 No Content could not be asserted to have the body a 204 is defined to have.

--assert-body has the same shape, which makes every pattern that legitimately matches an empty body unreachable: ^$, .*, \A\z and the empty pattern all fail against a 204 no matter what the response is.

Solution

Let the comparison decide the verdict, and keep the guard for what it was actually good at.

"missing" reads better than got "" when content was expected and none arrived — that is a genuine improvement to the failure message, and it is worth keeping. It just had no business running before the comparison. It now runs inside the failure branch:

$ http-assert --assert-body-eq '' http://…/empty
[+] PASSED 1ms

$ http-assert --assert-body-eq 'value' http://…/empty
- body: expected "value", missing        ← wording preserved

$ http-assert --assert-body-eq '' http://…/ok
- body: expected "", got "{\"status\":\"success\"}"

The inverse still fails, so this is not "stopped checking dressed up as fixed".

Other Changes

TestKnownIssue22EmptyBodyEqualsNeverPasses is deleted and replaced by TestE2EAssertEmptyBody, which covers both directions: the expectations an empty body now satisfies, and the ones it still must not.

Unit coverage adds the four patterns an empty body legitimately matches, both an empty and a nil BodyBytes (a 204 produces the latter), and a check that the "missing" wording survived. The existing table needed no changes — empty-body-versus-"value" still reports exactly what it did before, which is the evidence the message was preserved rather than sacrificed.

No README change: nothing in it described the broken behaviour, so there is nothing to correct.

There are no screenshots because there is no rendered UI; this tool's user-visible surface is terminal output, shown inline above.

Closes #22

Related:

• --assert-body-empty=false and --assert-ok=false behave inconsistently #32 — next in this stack; also an assertion that silently does less than asked

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https://claude.ai/code/session_019EMMhgmTkbzAsmeNy97PrP