Is there a way to exclude certain files in a fileset using containsregexp?

Question

Is there a way in ant to exclude certain files from a fileset using a regular expression?

containsregexp can be used to include files, but how do I exclude files matching a regex?

Answer 1

You're probably looking for the <not> selector container. The Ant docs example

<fileset dir="." includes="*.txt">
    <containsregexp expression="[4-6]\.[0-9]"/>
</fileset>

could be negated thus:

<fileset dir="." includes="*.txt">
    <not>
        <containsregexp expression="[4-6]\.[0-9]"/>
    </not>
</fileset>

Answer 2

In general you can use ! to prefix a regex pattern to invert the matching.

Here are some related discussion on inverted regex matching:

• How to "inverse match" with regex?

• Invert match with regexp

• Regex inverse matching on specific string?

• Regular expression to match a line that doesn't contain a word?