CODEWITHSUNDEEP
javaant
user1068636
user1068636

Reputation: 1939

is it possible to write an ant target that invokes a java function?

How do you write an ant target that takes a file as input and replaces all white space ' ' characters with '' (i.e. I need an ant target to "minify" the input text file and write it to disk)?

I know that in Java it's a simply doing something like this: 

public void minify(String originalString){
    String minifiedFile = originalString.replaceAll(" ", "");
}

But how do I get an ant target to invoke "minify()" function and how do I pass in a parameter "originalString" in Ant?

Would appreciate all / any advise.

Upvotes: 1

Views: 182

Answers (2)

Jayan
Jayan

Reputation: 18459

Recent version of ant support regular expression based string replacement. Here is code example from ant site

<replaceregexp match="\s+" replace=" " flags="g" byline="true">
    <fileset dir="${html.dir}" includes="**/*.html"/>
</replaceregexp>

For the original question - yes. You can extend ant by

Option 3 (calling programs like sed) will cause problems in the long term maintenance of build environment, though

Upvotes: 1

Tim Pote
Tim Pote

Reputation: 28029

Have you tried Ant-Contrib's PropertyRegex tag? That will perform a 'regex-replace' on a given string.

However, it sounds like you may be trying to do that to a whole file, in which case I would write an entire Java program (not just a single function) and invoke that program with ant's built-in Java task.

Alternatively, as @jahroy suggested in the comments, you could use Ant's built-in exec task to invoke sed. That's actually probably the easiest solution.

Upvotes: 2

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