Does there exist a way to do an equality check on 2 public keys in anchor tests with chai?

Question

When I compare two public keys with:

expect(lotteryState.authority).to.equal(user.publicKey);

I get the following error:

AssertionError: expected PublicKey(DCpJReAfonSrgohiQbTmKKbjbqVofspFRHz9yQikzooP){ _bn: <BN: b5531d6246f2015e72621c71ebf9304871dd8bbcf6f6c714948be6ddbd1e6ff2> } to equal PublicKey(DCpJReAfonSrgohiQbTmKKbjbqVofspFRHz9yQikzooP){ _bn: <BN: b5531d6246f2015e72621c71ebf9304871dd8bbcf6f6c714948be6ddbd1e6ff2> }

As you can see, both keys are the same but the test suite says that they are different. I can fix this by changing to a deep equality check:

expect(lotteryState.authority).to.deep.equal(user.publicKey);

But I am wondering if there exists a native method in anchor to compare to keys such as:

expect(lotteryState.authority).to.publicKeyEqual(user.publicKey);

Answer 1

The PublicKey class contains an equals method that can compare two pubkeys:

  equals(publicKey: PublicKey): boolean {
    return this._bn.eq(publicKey._bn);
  }

IIRC there can also be compare issues here as well, so it is pretty common to just compare the base58 strings of both pubkeys (pubkey1.toBase58() and pubkey2.toBase58()).