Exclamation mark doubt in ant

[Jas Oberai]

Hi Friends,
I have a ant script,that reads a paramterized file(abc.xml) and does filtering and produces a output file(xyz.xml)...depending upon the values setup in the properties file.

Now,my problem is if i put a exclamation mark in the properties file as some value,it is automatically ignored by the script.

So, abcd! becomes abcd ... so is "!" a special character,if yes how to excape it then??

Thanks

[Tim Holloway]

"A natural line that contains only white space characters is considered blank and is ignored. A comment line has an ASCII '#' or '!' as its first non-white space character; comment lines are also ignored and do not encode key-element information. In addition to line terminators, this method considers the characters space (' ', '\u0020'), tab ('\t', '\u0009'), and form feed ('\f', '\u000C') to be white space."

From http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.4.2/docs/api/java/util/Properties.html

To get around this problem, use a backslash character as an escape (that is: "\!").

This isn't really an Ant problem - it applies to any use of a properties file in Java.

[Jas Oberai]

Thanks a lot TIM for that detailed explanation..have a great weekend