I’m quite a newbie in Ant, but I thought it would be straightforward to do a regular expression replacement in a string contained in a property; in my case, I had to replace Windows backslashes with Unix slashes… apparently, unless you use the propertyregex task from Ant Contrib, that is not supported out-of-the-box: you have to pass through a file!
This stackoverflow post shows a possible solution, and starting from that, I created a macrodef to make it easier
<!-- = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =
macrodef: replace_win_slashes
= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = -->
<macrodef name="replace_win_slashes">
<attribute name="property.to.process" default="default" />
<attribute name="output.property" default="default" />
<sequential>
<echo message="@{property.to.process}" file="some.tmp.file" />
<loadfile property="@{output.property}" srcFile="some.tmp.file">
<filterchain>
<tokenfilter>
<replaceregex pattern="\\" replace="/" flags="g" />
</tokenfilter>
</filterchain>
</loadfile>
<delete file="some.tmp.file" />
</sequential>
</macrodef>
This macro takes the property value to process (property.to.process) and the property name where to store the result; it outputs the input value to a temporary file, reads it back with a regular expression replacement (which is supported for files) and store it in the specified property (the temporary file is then deleted).
Here’s an example of use
<project name="replace win slashes" >
<property name="my.prop1" value="file:C:\Users\bettini/my/path1" />
<!-- = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =
macrodef: replace_win_slashes
= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = -->
<macrodef name="replace_win_slashes">
<attribute name="property.to.process" default="default" />
<attribute name="output.property" default="default" />
<sequential>
<echo message="@{property.to.process}" file="some.tmp.file" />
<loadfile property="@{output.property}" srcFile="some.tmp.file">
<filterchain>
<tokenfilter>
<replaceregex pattern="\\" replace="/" flags="g" />
</tokenfilter>
</filterchain>
</loadfile>
<delete file="some.tmp.file" />
</sequential>
</macrodef>
<replace_win_slashes property.to.process="${my.prop1}" output.property="my-prop-1" />
<echo message="my-prop-1 = ${my-prop-1}" />
</project>
