Text-Rewrite: A Text-Transforming Ant Task

By Charles M. Chen, charlesmchen@gmail.com.

This Ant Task performs a variety of simple operations on text files.

Although not yet version 1.0, Text-Rewrite is working and can be easily intergrated into your build process.

It is Open Source; free as in freedom and free as in beer.

Version 0.75 (September 5th, 2006)

Source distribution includes binary, source and this document. The source also depends on private libraries that I haven't yet published, but will soon.

Step 1: Download the binary.

Step 2: Adds a task definition to your project, like so:

 
<taskdef name="TextRewrite" classname="org.cmc.textrewrite.TextRewriteTask" classpath="${libs}/text-rewrite.jar" />

You can either specify the classpath in the task definition (as above), if you haven't added it to ant's classpath in another way (for example, at invokation).

Step 3: Invoke TextRewrite, for example:

 
<TextRewrite>

	<fileset dir="${src-dist}">
	<include name="**/*.html" />
	</fileset>

	<lineCount />
	<searchAndReplace find="findthis" replace="replacewiththis" />
	<changeCase mode="title" />
	<lineCount />
	<stripEmptyLines />
	<lineCount />
	<tail limit="20" />
	<lineCount />
	
</TextRewrite  >

Note that you can apply any number of text transformations with a single invocation of TextRewrite. Here we a) search & replace, b) Change to Title Case, c) Strip Empty Lines and d) tail, printing out line counts as we go.

Append

Append a string to the right/end of each line.

Args:

Value (String)

Sample Usage: <append value="	// comment " />

line 1 line 2

yields:

line 1 // comment // comment line 2 // comment

ChangeCase

Change case of each line.

Args:

Mode (upper/lower/title)

Sample Usage: <changeCase mode="title" />

line 1 line 2

yields:

Line 1 Line 2

ClipLeft

Remove characters from the left/beginning of each line.

Args:

Count (Optional number, default: 1)

Sample Usage: <clipLeft count="2" />

line 1 line 2

yields:

ne 1 ne 2

ClipRight

Remove characters from the right/end of each line.

Args:

Count (Optional number, default: 1)

Sample Usage: <clipRight />

line 1 line 2

yields:

line line

EscapeXML

Escapes XML/HTML reserved characters with entities.

Args: None.

Sample Usage: <escapeXML />

yields:

Head

Remove all but the first n lines of each file.

Args:

Limit (Optional number, default: 100)

Sample Usage: <head limit="1" />

line 1 line 2

yields:

line 1

Left

Remove all but the first n characters of each line.

Args:

Count (Optional number, default: 1)

Sample Usage: <left count="3" />

line 1 line 2

yields:

lin lin

LineCount

Prints a line count, without changing the file.

Args: None.

Sample Usage: <stripEmptyLines />

line 1 line 2

yields:

line 1 line 2

Prepend

Prepend a string to the left/beginning of each line.

Args:

Value (String)

Sample Usage: <prepend value=" > " />

line 1 line 2

yields:

> line 1 > > line 2

PrependLineCount

Prepend a running line count to each line.

Args: None.

Sample Usage: <prependLineCount />

line 1 line 2

yields:

1: line 1 2: 3: line 2

ReverseLine

Reverses each line, character-by-character.

Args: None.

Sample Usage: <reverseLine />

line 1 line 2

yields:

1 enil 2 enil

Right

Remove all but the last n characters of each line.

Args:

Count (Optional number, default: 1)

Sample Usage: <right count="3" />

line 1 line 2

yields:

e 1 e 2

SearchAndReplace

Search & Replace

Args:

find (String)

replace (String)

Sample Usage: <searchAndReplace find="line" replace="li^ne" />

line 1 line 2

yields:

li^ne 1 li^ne 2

Sort

Sorts the file by line.

Args:

ignoreCase (Optional boolean, default: false)

Sample Usage: <sort ignoreCase="true" />

d c a b

yields:

a b c d

StripEmptyLines

Removes blank lines from the file.

Args: None.

Sample Usage: <stripEmptyLines />

line 1 line 2

yields:

line 1 line 2

Tail

Remove all but the last n lines of each file.

Args:

Limit (Optional number, default: 100)

Sample Usage: <tail limit="1" />

line 1 line 2

yields:

line 2

Trim

Removes whitespace from the beginning and end of each line.

Args: None.

Sample Usage: <stripEmptyLines />

line 1 line 2 line 3

yields:

line 1 line 2 line 3

Version 0.75 released September 5th, 2006.

To do list:

This text is available under the ASF (Apache) License.

This is a non-viral Open Source license.