LoadFile

Description

Specialization of loadresource that works on files exclusively and provides a srcFile attribute for convenience. Unless an encoding is specified, the encoding of the current locale is used.

If the resource content is empty (maybe after processing a filterchain) the property is not set.

Parameters

Attribute Description Required
srcFile source file Yes
property property to save to Yes
encoding encoding to use when loading the file No
failonerror Whether to halt the build on failure No; default true
quiet Do not display a diagnostic message (unless Apache Ant has been invoked with the -verbose or -debug switches) or modify the exit status to reflect an error. Setting this to true implies setting failonerror to false. Since Ant 1.7.0. No; default false

The LoadFile task supports nested FilterChains.

Examples

Load file message.txt into property message; an <echo> can print this.

<loadfile property="message"
          srcFile="message.txt"/>

The above is identical to

<loadresource property="message">
    <file file="message.txt"/>
</loadresource>

Load a file using the Latin-1 encoding

<loadfile property="encoded-file"
          srcFile="loadfile.xml"
          encoding="ISO-8859-1"/>

Load a file, don't fail if it is missing (a message is printed, though)

<loadfile property="optional.value"
          srcFile="optional.txt"
          failonerror="false"/>

Load a property which can be used as a parameter for another task (in this case mail), merging lines to ensure this happens.

<loadfile property="mail.recipients"
          srcFile="recipientlist.txt">
    <filterchain>
        <striplinebreaks/>
    </filterchain>
</loadfile>

Load an XML file into a property, expanding all properties declared in the file in the process.

<loadfile property="system.configuration.xml"
          srcFile="configuration.xml">
    <filterchain>
        <expandproperties/>
    </filterchain>
</loadfile>