Raphael Stolt has a new post to his site for the PHP on Windows users out there helping you to keep your integration tests green when little things (like line ending differences) can cause issues between the Windows and unix-based platforms.

Lately on a Windows system, some failing integration tests for CLI commands utilising the Symfony Console component caused me some blip headaches by PHPUnit insisting that two strings are not identical due to different line endings. The following post documents the small steps I took to overcome these headaches.

He starts with the error message that the failing test was giving, a slightly unhelpful response with the "actual" and "expected" values looking basically the same. He suspected it to be something different with the encoding or line endings (a common issue between Windows and Linux platforms). To confirm his suspicions he looked deeper into the Symfony Console code and, on locating the difference, extended the "CommandTester" class to automatically disable the "decorated" setting across all tests.