Quick post today about something that I was debugging that I thought might help someone out.

We were using should.js for Mocha assertions. In some of the tests, I was suddenly getting warnings like:

WARN Strict version of eql return different result for this comparison
WARN it means that e.g { a: 10 } is equal to { a: "10" }, make sure it is expected
WARN To disable any warnings add should.warn = false
WARN If you think that is not right, raise issue on github https://github.com/shouldjs/should.js/issues

I tried adding the should.warn = false but that did not seem to have an effect. Plus, this code would have been required in each file that had the problem, so it is an unsatisfactory solution.

The solution is to change things like the following:

response.status.should.eql('404');

in the tests to:

response.status.should.equal(404);

Basically should.js tries to ensure that we are doing what we expect when matching equality. Since the types don’t exactly match, it issues a warning so that we take a cloer look. This behavior must have changed recently when I saw it, since it previously seemed to work. Happily, the new way of doing this is more correct as a side effect.