Question

I’m running up against my failure to understand regex substitution patterns and Apache Ant’s limited documentation on propertyregex. My problem is that I need to take the ${user.name} property and make a lowercase version called ${user.name.lc} but I can’t get the replace string correct.

This is what I’ve got:

  <target name="foobar">
    <echo>${user.name}</echo>
    <propertyregex 
                property="user.name.lc" 
                input="${user.name}" 
                regexp="[A-Z]" 
                replace="[a-z]" 
                global="true" />
    <echo>${user.name.lc}</echo>
  </target>

It finds the upper case portions of the name correctly, but the replacement bombs. This is what I get:

foobar:
   [echo] Sally Fields
   [echo] [a-z]ally [a-z]ields

I’ve been googling and reading for about two hours trying different substitution strings. The ant document refers to groupings and shows examples with these. No help for me because there may or may not be groupings in the user name.

Can anyone provide me with what Ant says I need a “regular expression substitition pattern?”
my

Answer 1

Don’t use regex for this. There are only a few regex engines which support what you are looking for and I don’t think propertyregex is one of them. Use this instead :

  <pathconvert property="converted">
   <path path="${user.name}"/>
   <chainedmapper>
    <flattenmapper/>
    <scriptmapper language="javascript">
     self.addMappedName(source.toLowerCase()); 
    </scriptmapper>
    </chainedmapper>
  </pathconvert>

  <echo>${converted}</echo>