Apache Ant TasksReplaceRegExpReplaceRegExpDescriptionReplaceRegExp is a directory based task for replacing theoccurrence of a given regular expression with a substitution patternin a selected file or set of files. The output file is only written if it differs from the existingfile. This prevents spurious rebuilds based on unchanged files whichhave been regenerated by this task. Similar to regexptype mappers this task needs a supporting regular expressionlibrary and an implementation oforg.apache.tools.ant.util.regexp.Regexp.See details in the documentation of the Regexp Type. Parameters | Attribute | Description | Required | | file | file for which the regular expression should be replaced. | Yes if no nested <fileset> is used | | match | The regular expression pattern to match in the file(s) | Yes, if no nested <regexp> is used | | replace | The substitution pattern to place in the file(s) in place of the regular expression. | Yes, if no nested <substitution> is used | | flags | The flags to use when matching the regular expression. For more information, consult the Perl5 syntax
g : Global replacement. Replace all occurrences found
i : Case Insensitive. Do not consider case in the match
m : Multiline. Treat the string as multiple lines of input, using "^" and "$" as the start or end of any line, respectively, rather than start or end of string.
s : Singleline. Treat the string as a single line of input, using "." to match any character, including a newline, which normally, it would not match.
| No | | byline | Process the file(s) one line at a time, executing the replacement on one line at a time (true/false). This is useful if you want to only replace the first occurrence of a regular expression on each line, which is not easy to do when processing the file as a whole. Defaults to false. | No | | encoding | The encoding of the file. since Apache Ant 1.6 | No - defaults to default JVM encoding | | preserveLastModified | Keep the file timestamp(s) even if the file(s) is(are) modified. since Ant 1.8.0. | No, defaults to false | Examples<replaceregexp file="${src}/build.properties" match="OldProperty=(.*)" replace="NewProperty=1" byline="true"/>replaces occurrences of the property name "OldProperty" with "NewProperty" in a properties file, preserving the existingvalue, in the file ${src}/build.properties Parameters specified as nested elementsThis task supports a nested FileSet element. Since Ant 1.8.0 this task supports any filesystem based resource collections as nested elements. This task supports a nested Regexp element to specify the regular expression. You can use this element to refer to a previously defined regular expression datatype instance. <regexp id="id" pattern="alpha(.+)beta"/>
<regexp refid="id"/> This task supports a nested Substitution element to specify the substitution pattern. You can use this element to refer to a previously defined substitution pattern datatype instance. <substitution id="id" expression="beta1alpha"/>
<substitution refid="id"/> Examples <replaceregexp byline="true"> <regexp pattern="OldProperty=(.*)"/> <substitution expression="NewProperty=1"/> <fileset dir="."> <include name="*.properties"/> </fileset></replaceregexp> replaces occurrences of the property name "OldProperty" with "NewProperty" in a properties file, preserving the existingvalue, in all files ending in .properties in the current directory <replaceregexp match="s+" replace=" " flags="g" byline="true"> <fileset dir="${html.dir}" includes="**/*.html"/></replaceregexp>
replaces all whitespaces (blanks, tabs, etc) by one blank remaining theline separator. So with input <html> <body><<TAB>><h1> T E S T </h1> <<TAB>> <<TAB>> </body></html>
would converted to<html> <body> <h1> T E S T </h1> </body></html> | 
