With Ant or Phing, I need to load a file's contents into a property, run a regular expression on the value of that property, and then store the result of that regular expression in another property. What's the best way to do this?
I can load the file into a property easily (with Phing) like so:
<loadfile file="myfile.txt" property="my.file" />
And I know how to update the file, but I can't seem to figure out how to run a regex on that property, and store the result in a new property for future use.
Any help would be greatly appreciated!
Update
I've been tinkering with it, and this will work. Let me know if there's a streamlined way though! The code below loads a file into a property, then reduces it to only the line that contains the title tag. And then, it runs a regular expression on that line, and stores the contents of that tag in my.prop.
<loadfile file="../index.html" property="my.prop">
<filterchain>
<linecontainsregexp>
<regexp pattern="<title>" />
</linecontainsregexp>
<replaceregexp>
<regexp pattern="[\s\S]+<title>(.+?)</title>" replace="$1" />
</replaceregexp>
</filterchain>
</loadfile>
Update 2
Actually, I ended up using an adhoc task to create my own. Worked perfectly!
You can run an arbitrary command from an ant target like this:
<exec executable="bash">
<arg line="script.sh"/>
</exec>
You can for example store the result of the regexp in a tmp file and then load it into another property the same way as the initial one.
In Phing you could process the content of the property where you loaded the file using the "php" task. See: http://www.phing.info/docs/guide/stable/chapters/appendixes/AppendixB-CoreTasks.html#PhpEvalTask
Related
I need to replace property value in a xml file using the property name.
Ex:
<property name="test-name" value="default-value"/>
I have a target to replace this value . i.e "default-value". User can run this target several times if he's given a wrong value for property test-name he can try again running target with correct value. Therefore i can not use regular expression to replace "default-value". I can only rely on property name. Is there a way to replace property value using it's name in ant ?
The typical way to do that in Ant is to copy or move the files you want to change, using a FilterSet to define the token-value pairs you want to replace in the files.
So in your "template" version of the file you might have something like this
<document>
<element value="#test-name#"/>
</document>
And in your build file you might have something like this:
<property name="my.value" value="default-value"/>
<copy file="${build.dir}/version.txt" toFile="${dist.dir}/version.txt" override="true">
<filterset>
<filter token="test-name" value="${my.value}"/>
</filterset>
</copy>
Since I wanted to allow the user to replace value multiple times ( if he/she given a wrong value) i came up with following solution,
<replaceregexp
replace="property name="my.propertyKey"
value="user.value""
byline="true" file="${basedir}/test.xml">
<regexp pattern="property name="my.property"
value="(.*)""/>
</replaceregexp>
This searches property, using property key and replace entire line.
I am trying to copy an entire xml tag from a file and append it to another file.
I have been messing arround with filterchains
<loadproperties srcFile="${dir}/file.xml">
<filterchain>
<linecontainsregexp>
<regexp pattern="<assembly-descriptor> "/>
</linecontainsregexp>
</filterchain>
</loadproperties>
I dont know how to form the regx pattern.
the source file looks some thing like this
<assembly-descriptor>
<somelines>
<somelines>
<somelines>
</assembly-descriptor>
i need to copy the this entire tag to another file .
Treating xml with line matching/regular expression matching will eventually fail. Could you write a small program to do what you have described. Apparently there are some task for xml.
If you are okay with xslt, xslt task could help.
I have the following simple thing to do with Ant but did not find how to do that:
move build/xxx/file.ext to dest/xxxfile.ext
I'm no Ant Guru .
file.ext is constant in this particular case
Nota : xxx can take many values so I want to apply to all these values
You need to use a mapper element to generate the destination file names. This is derived from the Ant mapper docs:
<move todir="dest">
<fileset dir="build" includes="*/*.ext" />
<mapper type="regexp" from="^([^/]*)/([^/]*)" to="\1\2"/>
</move>
When in doubt, an exec will do the job for you, but it's not always the best way.
Try the move task.
<move file="build/xxx/file.ext" tofile="dest/xxxfile.ext"/>
I'm trying to use <concat> as a resource collection in a <zip> task and, according to the documentation, this should work. I'd like to do this because some of the files I want to include in the zip need to have some properties expanded, so I will also add a <filterchain> to the <concat> to do this. I'd prefer to do it directly rather than copying to a temp location (with property substitution) and including the copy in the zip file.
However, I can't seem to get <zip> to correctly use the <concat> element.
A simplified example of what I have so far:
<zip destfile="target/dist.zip">
<concat>
<fileset file="CHANGES.txt" />
</concat>
</zip>
This creates a zip file containing several directories all named concat (C: (obviously this is on a Windows machine).
What am I missing?
A colleague and I came up with the answer by looking through the <zip> and <concat> source. There are really two answers:
<concat>'s implementation of the ResourceCollection interface is odd, but we understand why.
There's a way around that.
For #1, while <concat> is a ResourceCollection (like FileSet), under the hood it returns as the name of single Resource it contains a hard-coded value:
"concat (" + String.valueOf(c) + ")";
Look familiar?
The name of resources is normally ignored--except by <zip> and its related tasks, which uses the resource name as the ZipEntry name. Since <concat> returns the odd-looking name, that's what we get in the zip file.
I haven't quite figured out why I get multiple entries, but it doesn't matter: the observation leads to a convoluted solution.
Since I know the name of the ZipEntry I want to create, I can use a <mapper> to give the <concat> resource a name. Here's what I came up with in all its glory:
<zip destfile="target/distribution.zip">
<fileset dir=".">
<exclude name="target/**" />
<exclude name="CHANGES.txt" />
</fileset>
<mappedresources>
<concat>
<fileset file="CHANGES.txt" />
<filterchain>
<expandproperties />
</filterchain>
</concat>
<mergemapper to="CHANGES.txt" />
</mappedresources>
</zip>
As my colleague says "In Ant every problem can be solved using a mapper."
This only works for Ant 1.8+ because <mappedresources> was added in that release.
I'm going to post some comments to the Ant mailing list and suggest a couple of enhancements:
Allow a resource name to be specified as an attribute on <concat> when it's being used as a ResourceCollection.
Throw an exception (and don't create a synthetic value) if getName() is called without having a value specified.
Finally, though not directly related, I do wish <expandproperties> could take a <propertyset> so I can control which properties get substituted.
Do you want the final zip to contain a single file or multiple files? As far as I can see, using concat (when done successfully, which isn't done above) would produce a single file, the result of concatenation of all files in the resource collection.
If you want multiple files rather than concatenation, I think intermediate copy is what you'll need.
From Ant manual for the concat task:
Since Apache Ant 1.7.1, this task can
be used as a Resource Collection that
will return exactly one resource.
I'm writing a velocity macro within which I have some ant tasks. Within a #foreach loop in the velocity macro, I have a pathconvert task:
#foreach(<iterate through something>)
<pathconvert property='filename' refid='swf.file'>
<mapper>
<chainedmapper>
<flattenmapper/>
<globmapper from='*-d.swf' to='*'/>
</chainedmapper>
</mapper>
</pathconvert>
#end
The problem I have is that the 'filename' property gets set only once, during the first iteration, since properties in ANT are immutable.
But I need the filename to be set during each iteration. Is there a way to get this done?
If there was a way to reset the property, I could do that at the end of each iteration. Or is there a better way to do this?
Any help would be highly appreciated!
Thanks in advance,
Anand
You could use ant-contrib's variables. They act like mutable properties.
http://ant-contrib.sourceforge.net/tasks/tasks/variable_task.html
Use the new lexically scoped properties in Ant 1.8:
"Lexically scoped local properties, i.e. properties that are only defined inside a target, sequential block or similar environment."
Annoucement.
Properties in Ant were designed to be immuatable, but they gave in to popular demand and gave us variables. Your alternative is to write a custom task ( in Java or a Dynamic Language) but this seems like a good compromise.
The following snippet illustrates an ant property which I guess is not documented. Properties are immutable, but references are mutable. So any data type which has no name, but a reference, is mutable. For example a fileset. But today I found a way to have a kind of mutable property. Connected with local task or some other tricks it may be a way of having variables in ant.
<property name="a" value="aaa" id="refa" />
<property name="b" refid="refa" />
<echo>${b}</echo>
<property name="c" value="ccc" id="refa" />
<property name="d" refid="refa" />
<echo>${d}</echo>
The output is:
aaa
ccc
Although in both cases a reference refa is printed.
Here is a post about it. And another one.
Use a combination of for + let task from Ant Plugin Flaka to overwrite existing properties.
See some snippets here.