Question

When echoing to a file. echo is printing extra tabs before what is printed.

I do not want these tabs there, why is ant doing this and how do i prevent?

Only using ant and/or ant-contrib. Nothing else.

<target 
    name="doThis">
    <delete 
        file="${PATH}/install.bat" 
        failonerror="true">
    </delete>

    <touch file="${PATH}/install.bat"></touch>

    <echo
        file="${PATH}/install.bat"
        level="verbose"
        append="true"
        message="if exist preinstall.bat call preinstall.bat${line.separator}">
    </echo>

    <foreach 
        trim="true"
        target="printStuff"
        param="stuffName">
        <path>
            <fileset dir="${basedir}/stuff/"></fileset>
        </path>
    </foreach>
</target>

<target 
    name="printStuff">
    <basename file="${stuffName}" property="stuffNameSmall"/>
    <echo
        file="${PATH}/install.bat"
        append="true"
        level="verbose"
        message="${stuffNameSmall}${line.separator}">
    </echo>
</target>

---

Example of output that is being printed currently:

<tab><tab>filename
<tab><tab>filename
<tab><tab>filename

Answer 1

My hunch: you have 2 tab chars inside the <echo …> </echo> xml element…

Try:

<echo
    file="${PATH}/install.bat"
    append="true"
    level="verbose"
    message="${stuffNameSmall}${line.separator}" />

The ‘echo’ task will print out the ‘message’ attribute value, as well as everything inside the nested text node. So best to always close the tag immediately if you don’t need to printout extra stuff (like multi-line ASCII art, oh yeah!).