Hamcrest contains() is weird

I have been using Hamcrest in Java for as long as I can remember. I love using it because it’s much more powerful than native JUnit assertions, and the assertions read much easier. So instead of this:

assertEquals(actual, expected);

We get:

assertThat(actual, is(expected));

Yeah, it’s actually more keystrokes, but that’s Java’s thing 😎.

My favorite part about Hamcrest is using it for asserting on items in collections, but the behavior of the contains() matcher can be quite odd. Say you have a list [A, B] and you store it in a variable list. If you run

assertThat(list, contains("A"));

The assertion will actually fail - this is because the contains() matcher actually means containsExactly(). I use this custom assertion as a convenience:

public static void <T> containsExactly(T... members) {
  contains(members);
}