Lab 6- Brave Browser Bug

This week’s lab we focused on Brave Browser. For this lab, we were required  to fix a bug in Brave using Test Driven Development. This is the first time I have heard of this term, but I am somewhat familiar with the concept. From my understand of it, we need to create tests that would currently fail, and work backwards from there. From these tests, we can code the fix for the bug.

The first step was to build Brave. I had no issues here. The next steps were to recreate the bug. The bug is about how the browser handles URLs. URLs can sometimes be search terms that are used by the default browser. For example, simply typing “dog” into the URL bar will search for “dog” in the search engine. Brave does this as well. The issue arises when you add a space in between words after the search query. Below are the test cases:

• "dog" - Works as expected
• " dog "- Works as expected
• "dog cat"- Works as expected
• " dog cat "- Works as expected
• "https://www.google.ca/search?q=dog"- Works as expected
• " https://www.google.ca/search?q=dog "- Works as expected
• "https://www.google.ca/search?q=dog cat" - does not work as expected. Instead places the link inside search box.
• " https://www.google.ca/search?q=dog cat " - does not work as expected. Instead places the link inside search box.
• "/home/joe/git/browser-laptop/dog cat.txt" - Does not work as expected. Puts this URL inside search engine.
• " /home/joe/git/browser-laptop/dog cat.txt " - Does not work as expected. Puts this URL inside search engine.
• "file:///home/joe/git/browser-laptop/dog cat.txt" - Works as expected, but replaces the space with %20.
• " file:///home/joe/git/browser-laptop/dog cat.txt " - Work as expected, but replaces the space with %20.

The next step was to create tests. I began with testing URLs with space in between words in the search query.  I created the test cases which failed, as expected. I found the function ‘prependScheme’ which deals with the input URL. I tried fixing this function by adding a replace(/\s/g, “%20”), in each of the if statements. This worked for the case that prepends file:/// before the URL. The issue I was having was that I couldn’t debug Brave through VSCode. I couldn’t tell if my changes were being made to the browser. The only way I could test the code changes was to run the test cases again.

The case I was having difficulties fixing was https://www.google.ca/search?q=dog cat. I couldn’t figure out why the code wasn’t replacing the spaces with %20. I tried creating my own if statement inside prependScheme to replace the spaces. It still wouldn’t work. I decided to look elsewhere; I looked for the code that calls prependScheme. In the function getUrlFromInput, it passes input.trim() to prependScheme. However, it doesn’t replace the spaces with %20. I thought this would be a good place to replace the spaces before passing the URL to prependScheme.w

The change seemed to work, as my tests finally passed. However, I still couldn’t see the changes on Brave.