Replace a token with a variable using ANT
Published by Nicholas Dunbar on November 15th, 2014
You may be looking for the following:
How do you replace a string in a file using a property in ANT?
How do you replace a string using a variable in ANT?
There are a few ways to do this. First question is what do you mean by a variable? Do you mean a variable set in a property file like the following?
prompt> ls -l
-rw-r--r--@ 1 nicholasdunbar staff 2245 Nov 15 13:42 dev2.properties
The contents of dev2.properties being something like the following:
prompt> cat dev2.properties
crontabPath=/some/dir/
or do you mean a variable set in a property in your build file like the following?
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| <?xml version="1.0"?> | |
| <project default="main" basedir="."> | |
| <!-- This is the example of creating a variable or inline property, directly in the build file--> | |
| <property name="CRONTAB_PATH" value="/some/dir/"/> | |
| </project> |
First we will talk about how to do it with the property file and then with the property tag/task.
Example 1 property file:
So lets say we have the following files:
prompt> ls -l
-rw-r--r--@ 1 nicholasdunbar staff 2245 Nov 15 13:42 dev2.properties
-rw-r--r-- 1 nicholasdunbar staff 369 Nov 13 18:39 crontab
prompt> cat dev2.properties
crontabPath=/some/dir/
prompt> cat crontab
00 00 * * * echo '25 hour record written by the crontab:' > @cronPath@crontab.log;
If we want to replace @cronPath@ in the file crontab with '/some/dir/' from dev2.properties we would use the following ANT task:
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| <copy file="crontab" | |
| tofile="crontabTest.txt" | |
| overwrite="true"> | |
| </copy> | |
| <replace file="crontabTest.txt" | |
| propertyFile="dev2.properties"> | |
| <replacefilter token="@cronPath@" | |
| property="cronPath"/> | |
| </replace> | |
| <!-- | |
| Code excerpt from http://boulderapps.co/replace-a-token-with-a-variable-using-ant | |
| --> |
So we have generated a file called crontabTest.txt and replaced the tokens with our "variable" as we can see in the following:
prompt> cat crontabText.txt
00 00 * * * echo '25 hour record written by the crontab:' > /some/dir/crontab.log;
Example 2 using the property task to replace a token with a variable:
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| <property name="CRONTAB_PATH" value="/some/dir/"/> | |
| <task name="generateCrontab"> | |
| <copy file="crontab" | |
| tofile="crontabTest.txt" | |
| overwrite="true"> | |
| <filterchain> | |
| <replacetokens> | |
| <token key="cronPath" value="${CRONTAB_PATH}"/> | |
| </replacetokens> | |
| </filterchain> | |
| </copy> | |
| </task> | |
| <!-- | |
| Code excerpt from http://boulderapps.co/replace-a-token-with-a-variable-using-ant | |
| --> |
So if we were to look in the file crontabTest.txt we would see the following:
prompt> cat crontabText.txt
00 00 * * * echo '25 hour record written by the crontab:' > /some/dir/crontab.log;
As you can see the token has successfully been replaced. Thank you for reading. Please, leave a comment if this helped you or if you have a question.
Posted on November 15th, 2014