Question

I’ve posted to 2 forums already (CodeRanch and nabble) and no one has responded with an answer …. so stack overflow … you are my last hope. All I’m trying to do is delete the “\n” from a file using an Ant task. There simply is a bunch of empty lines in a file and I don’t want them there anymore … here is the code I used ..

    <replaceregexp file="${outputFile}"
     match="^[ \t\n]+$"
     replace=""
     byline="true"/>

It’s not picking up the regular expression and I’ve tried a hundred different ways and I can’t figure it out. Any ideas?

Answer 1

This works:

<replaceregexp file="..."
               match="(\r?\n)\s*\r?\n" 
               flags="g"
               replace="\1" />

The point is to match line ends manually and globally (flags="g").