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>