Cucumber Escaping Quotation Marks

While asserting some text on a webpage, sometimes you will find that part of the text contains a single quote or double quote.

Then I should see "Hello "World"" text

The step which Cucumber Auto generates for you will escape the text but will not accept the text given in double-quotes, and if you try to take this parameter in your method, you will get an error. 

Step Generated By Cucumber

@Then("I should see \"Hello \"World\"\" text")
public void i_should_see_hello_world_text() {
}

This will not read "Hello "World""

You will get "The gherkin step has 0 arguments Error" if you will try to pass parameter to your method like this:

@Then("I should see \"Hello \"World\"\" text")
public void i_should_see_hello_world_text(String s) {
}

and if you will try to replace Hello World with parameter {string}, Cucumber will not detect your step definition.

Escaping of quotation marks in Cucumber steps

One way to handle this is to add a backslash (\) before double quotes or single quotes in your step.

Steps

Then I should see "Hello \'World\'" text
Then I should see "Hello \"World\"" text

Step Definition

Below step definition will work fine for above 2 steps.

@Then("I should see {string} text")
public void i_should_see1(String string) {
    System.out.println("Test:"+string);
}

Capturing Quotes in Step Definition

Then I should see "Hello "World"" text
Then I should see "Hello 'World'" text

Handling Double Quotes

@Then("^I should see \"([\\w\\s\"]*)\" text$")
public void teststep3(String s)
{
    System.out.println("value is:"+s);
}
	

or

@Then("^I should see \"([a-zA-Z \"]*)\" text")
public void i_should_see_text(String string) {
    System.out.println(string);
}

Handling Single Quotes 

@Then("^I should see \"([\\w\\s']*)\" text$")
public void teststep4(String s)
{
    System.out.println("value is:"+s);
}

Handling Single and Double Quotes together

@Then("^I should see \"([\\w\\s\"']*)\" text$")
public void teststep3(String s)
{
	System.out.println("value is:"+s);
}

Here,

• () : Capturing Group
• [] : Match Character in Bracket
• \\w : word Character. You can also use a-zA-Z
• \\s : Whitespace. You can also use space
• \" : For Double Quotes
• ' : For Single Quotes
• * : 0 or More