I'm trying to write a script/framework to automate testing of our program. I need to figure a way to verify/validate the results, either using regular expressions or diffing the results against a known/good/expected results file.
I was warned if we go the route of diffing files, if someone decides to change the format/output of the program, then we'd have to regenerate all the files to diff against.
However, we could also argue that the same thing would happen with the regular expression route too, that if the output is changed that drastically, we'd need to edit and test the regular expressions too.
So, with that said, that comes back to my original question; which method is better for verifying output from automated testing? If there's another method, I'm all ears. =)