find replace text in file with Phing

Question

Does anyone know how to find and replace text inside a file with Phing?

Answer 1

The simplest way to achieve this using 'traditional' tools would be sed:

sed -i 's/old/new/g'  myfile.txt

And if it is ant-based then this should help: http://ant.apache.org/manual/Tasks/replace.html

The simplest form would be <replace file="myfile.html" token="OLD" value="NEW"/>.

And if you really need it, you could run external tools with ant as explained at http://ant.apache.org/manual/Tasks/exec.html, which means that among other things you could call sed from ant with something like:

 <exec executable="sed">
   <arg value="s/old/new/g" />
   <arg value="$MY_FILE" />
 </exec>

Answer 2

If you don't want to copy files and just replace a string in the current folder where your files reside, do a reflexive task:

<reflexive>
    <fileset dir=".">
        <include pattern="*.js" />
    </fileset>
    <filterchain>
        <replaceregexp>
            <regexp pattern="SEARCH" replace="REPLACEMENT"/>
        </replaceregexp>
    </filterchain>
</reflexive>

Answer 3

You can replace text inside files using filters. Filters are used inside other file operation tasks such as copy.

I believe the main idea behind filters is that you can have template files with tokens instead of real values and you then substitute the tokens as a part of the copy process.

Quick example: have a database configuration template file stored in a template directory. Then you copy it to the target configuration file using:

<copy file="templates/database.config.php.tpl" tofile="config/database.config.php" overwrite="true">
                <filterchain>
                    <replacetokens begintoken="%%" endtoken="%%">
                        <!-- MySQL TOKENS -->
                        <token key="dbname" value="${db.mysql.dbname}" />
                        <token key="dbhost" value="${db.mysql.host}" />
                        <token key="dbport" value="${db.mysql.port}" />
                        <token key="dbuser" value="${db.mysql.username}" />
                        <token key="dbpassword" value="${db.mysql.password}" />
                    </replacetokens>
                </filterchain>
            </copy>

There are plenty of other filters (e.g. regex search and replace) available. See more about filters in the documentation: http://phing.info/docs/guide/stable/chapters/appendixes/AppendixD2-CoreFilters.html

Answer 4

I was looking for the same thing, and I found out that exists a filter named ExpandProperties which allows to replace properties in the copied file. For example I used it in a apache virtual host template:

<target name="apache-config" description="Generates apache configuration">
    <!-- Default value for Debian/Ubuntu -->
    <property name="apache.vhost.dir" value="/etc/apache2/sites-available" override="false"/>
    <copy file="${application.startdir}/docs/vhost.conf.tpl" todir="${apache.vhost.dir}" overwrite="true">
        <filterchain>
            <expandproperties/>
        </filterchain>
    </copy>
    <echo message="Apache virtual host configuration copied, reload apache to activate it"/>
</target>

And in the template file

<VirtualHost *:80>
   DocumentRoot "${application.startdir}/public"
   ServerName ${apache.default.host}

   <Directory "${application.startdir}/public">
       Options Indexes MultiViews FollowSymLinks
       AllowOverride All
       Order allow,deny
       Allow from all
   </Directory>

</VirtualHost>

In this way you don't need to explicitly list all the tokens you want replaced, pretty useful...

Answer 5

I use this on my phing build.xml file

<exec command="find ./ -type f -name '*.php' | xargs sed -i 's|x--Jversion--x|${jversion}|g'" dir="${targetdir}/_package/${extname}.${package.version}" /> 

Answer 6

The answer given by Acme, is the right one. If you try to copy a file to itself in order to modify it, yells telling that yo cannot self-copy.

<reflexive file="./app/config/config.yml" tofile="./app/config/config.yml">
    <filterchain>
    <replacetokens begintoken="__" endtoken="__">
        <token key="BUILD_VERSION" value="Replace Value" />
    </replacetokens>
    </filterchain>
</reflexive>

This works well for me.