[Updated on 2/25]

Have you seen this show up in your specs?

specify "should be empty" do
  @group.should be_empty
end

As of rev 1519, RSpec will now take (almost) all of the stock expectations and auto-generate spec names for you. So this:

context "A Group" do
  ...
  specify do
    @group.should be_empty
  end
end

A Group – should be empty This works for all of the standard expectations except those that take blocks, which would result in names like “should satisfy block”, which doesn’t seem that helpful.

Custom Expectation Matchers Getting this to work w/ your custom matchers is a snap. Just implement #to_s in the matcher to return a String with everything after “should ” or “should not ”. For example, Equal#to_s in RSpec looks like this:

def description
  "equal #{@expected.inspect}"
end

So the following specs:

specify do
  result.should equal(3)
end

specify do
  result.should_not equal("this string")
end

would result in the following output:

- should equal(3)
- should not equal(\"this string\")