You can easily get very close to this with Capybara: 'expect(page).to have(:css, ".article table th td", text: " hello world ")' Save functionality but you won'

You can easily get very close to this with Capybara: 'expect(page).to have(:css, ".article table th td", text: " hello world ")' Save functionality but you won't have to support that silly regex abstraction layer. If this is still not human readable enough, I would still recommend writing your own DSL on top of Capybara rather than matching to regexes like Cucumber does.