cy.url() and/or cy.location(‘href’) does not return a string

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tl;dr

Cypress commands are asynchronous, you have to use then to work with their yields.

cy.url().then(url => {
  cy.get('.editor-toolbar-actions-save').click();
  cy.url().should('not.eq', url);
});

Explanation

A similar question was asked on GitHub, and the official document on aliases explains this phenomenon in great detail:

You cannot assign or work with the return values of any Cypress command. Commands are enqueued and run asynchronously.

The solution is shown too:

To access what each Cypress command yields you use .then().

cy.get('button').then(($btn) => {
  // $btn is the object that the previous
  // command yielded us
})

It is also a good idea to check out the core concepts docs’s section on asynchronicity.

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