Cucumber-ruby newline parameters behaviour

[Eswarprasath Jayaraman]

I came across an issue in cucumber and I am not able to understand the underlying behaviour. It will be really great if some one can help me to understand this.

Issue: Cucumber-ruby (also Cucumber-Jruby) step definition, while matching a parameter containing new line, behaves one way when the parameter is specified in the Scenario's step and in a different way if it is in the example section of a Scenario outline. Please refer to the Scenario Outline and Scenario provided below.

Scenario Outline: new line in scenario outline
    Given this is also a new line test <line>

  Examples:
    | line             |
    | this has\ntest\n |

  Scenario: new line in scenario
    Given this is also a new line test this has\ntest\n

Step Definition for both the above scenarios:

Given(/^this is also a new line test ([^"]*)$/) do |line|
  a = <<'EOC'
this has
test
EOC
  puts line
  puts assert_equal(line, a)
end

While the first scenario passes the second one fails with the below message:

this has\ntest\n

MiniTest::Assertion: <"this has\\ntest\\n"> expected but was
<"this has\ntest\n">.
./features/step_definitions/my_steps.rb:61:in `/^this is also a new line test ([^"]*)$/'
./features/myTest.feature:25:in `Given this is also a new line test this has\ntest\n'
1 scenario (1 failed)
1 step (1 failed)
0m0.090s

From what I observed, when the parameter in a cucumber step has \n, then it is converted to '\\n'. This doesn't seem to be the case if the same string is in the Examples section of a Scenario Outline.

Is there a reason, why cucumber (or is it ruby?) interprets newline character differently depending upon the location of the parameter? Am I missing something very obvious here? Any inputs on this is appreciated.

Note: I have found out that using doc string will resolve this issue. But I would like to understand why \n in Scenario Steps behaves differently from Scenario Examples.

Ruby Version: 2.1.1 Cucumber Version : 1.3.15