Wild card in Contains assertion

With Contains, if you select regular expression, then there needs to be a complete match to the whole response body, so something like::

.*<\w+:rte>100<\/\w+:rte>.*

Rather than using contains, use XPath or another type of assertion (script assertion?)

When you use XPath and declare the namespaces, the prefixes are yours to make up (or let SoapUI make them up for you), and then those declarations are responsible for mapping the prefixes to the right namespaces. So even if more namespaces are added, as long as you don't change your declarations, then your existing assertions will still work.

//myns1:rte[1]

And as for script assertions, the default when using XmlSlurper is to ignore namespaces and just assume there's no conflicts.

assert new XmlSlurper()
.parseText(messageExchange.responseContent)
.Body.something.someThingElse.rte
.find {it == '100'} == true

OK, I discovered that the Contains assertion uses

content.matches(replToken)

i.e. java's String.matches(String), and the default RegEx behaviour for Java is different to Groovy:

String content = '''
<soapenv:Envelope xmlns:soapenv="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/" 
    xmlns:sam="http://www.soapui.org/sample/">
   <soapenv:Header/>
   <soapenv:Body>
      <sam:buyResponse>
         <sam:buyResponseContent>
            <purchasestatus>
               <rte>100</rte>
               <stockStatus>?</stockStatus>
               <expectedDelivery>?</expectedDelivery>
            </purchasestatus>
         </sam:buyResponseContent>
      </sam:buyResponse>
   </soapenv:Body>
</soapenv:Envelope>'''

String replToken = /.*rte.*/
"java: ${content.matches(replToken)}, groovy: ${(content =~ replToken).find()}"

java: false, groovy: true

The difference is in whether . matches to newline character. You can specify that it should in your Regex with (?s):

String replToken = /(?s).*rte.*/
"java: ${content.matches(replToken)}, groovy: ${(content =~ replToken).find()}"

java: true, groovy: true

Remember to write a pattern that matches to the whole response.