Hi Dominique,
Thanks for the info. And, also thanks for the specific example of the leading
"-" character.
Because Ant has only a global namespace for property names (and other names like macrodef, etc.), and for the case that a particular
ant script inherits properties from the caller, I'm adopting a convention that will help us know whether a particular name is local
to the being-called ant script. In particular, I'm favoring the convention that "local" names begin with a dot. We guarantee that
the caller never has defined any names that begin with a dot, so there is never a problem with conflicts. I had considered both the
"-" and the "." as a leading character to indicate the name is local. But, you've given a good reason to avoid "-". Thanks!
Enjoy,
Steve Amerige
SAS Institute, Deployment Software Developer
On 6/30/2011 9:31 AM, Dominique Devienne wrote:
On Thu, Jun 30, 2011 at 6:51 AM, Steve Amerige<steve.amer...@sas.com> wrote:
I'm looking for the authoritative specification within Ant for the value of
the name attribute as in:
<property name="xxx" .../>
<macrodef name="xxx" ...>
<target name="xxx" ...>
and so forth. I can't find within the Ant manual any BNF that defines what
a valid name is allowed to be.
Anything goes really, AFAIK. There is no specifications.
Some names will create issues, for example<target name="-foo"> can't
be called from the command line because -foo will be interpreted as a
CLI switch and since not found Ant will error out. This "behavior" is
relied upon to have "private" targets.
Also remember this is XML land, so attribute whitespace normalization
will apply (depending on the parser used possibly) which may result in
some whitespaces being removed.
But aside from these quirks, Ant does not put any restrictions on
names in general. --DD
PS: Also keep in mind that property expansion does occurs inside these
names, but I assume you mean the names after expansion.
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