Frank core steps make it more difficult to discover unused project steps

[rhgills]

When running cucumber with the stepdefs formatter, looking for unused steps, using something like the following:

cucumber -d -f stepdefs --color | grep "NOT MATCHED BY ANY STEPS" -B1

you'll see lots of output corresponding to unused steps bundled with frank, such as:

/^I wait to see a navigation bar titled "([^\"]*)"$/
# Frank-743854779301/gem/lib/frank-cucumber/core_frank_steps.rb:26
  NOT MATCHED BY ANY STEPS
--
/^a pop\-over menu is displayed with the following:$/
# Frank-743854779301/gem/lib/frank-cucumber/core_frank_steps.rb:237
  NOT MATCHED BY ANY STEPS

Is there any way to exclude these in this case, apart from parsing the output? I tried the --exclude cucumber option, which didn't seem to have any effect.

[ondrejhanslik]

I don't think this is possible easily since for cucumber the core steps are undistinguishable from other steps.
However:

1. --dry-run should simplify the output a bit since the steps will be sorted by filename
2. filtering by unix command line tools - it should be pretty easy to write a bash/ruby script that will remove the core_frank_steps parts
3. (my favourite) implement your own formatter. See https://github.com/cucumber/cucumber/blob/master/lib/cucumber/formatter/stepdefs.rb and https://github.com/cucumber/cucumber/blob/master/lib/cucumber/formatter/usage.rb . The changes required to filter out steps defined in a specific file would be minimal.

[rhgills]

Yeah, I ended up filtering the output with grep to only those steps found in my project's step definitions directory, in addition to being not matched by any steps. But I never would have thought of writing your own formatter to solve this, that's brilliant! Not sure if that would be something appropriate to bundle with Frank, though.