Ant replaceregexp example against the requirement to customize log4j e-mails

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Requirement:
- to customize log4j.xml so that all the e-mails are changed to some custom one
- facility: ANT tool

However there was lack of examples of replaceregexp ant task on the ant official page. So here is one extra example that addresses the following functional requirements
- replace all the entities like

old@yourdomain.com

so that old is replaced with new
- replace all the entities like

so that old is replaced with new

The solution is below:

  <target name="customize">
   <replaceregexp byline="true">
    <fileset dir="${BUILD_ROOT}" id="build_root_dir">
     <include name="**/log4j.xml" />
    </fileset>
    <regexp pattern="(.*?&gt;).+?(@yourdomain\.com.*)"/>
    <substitution expression="\1${reciever-alias-to-substitute}\2" />
   </replaceregexp>
   <replaceregexp byline="true">
    <fileset dir="${BUILD_ROOT}" id="build_root_dir">
     <include name="**/log4j.xml" />
    </fileset>
    <regexp pattern="(.*?value\=&quot;).+?(@yourdomain\.com&quot;.*)"/>
    <substitution expression="\1${reciever-alias-to-substitute}\2" />
   </replaceregexp>
  </target>

As you can see here it is used two replaceregexp tasks. It is done because unfortunately replaceregexp does not support several patterns inside, so once we need to process the files with two different patterns we should use two different replaceregexp tasks.

The one more thing it is useful to know is that you should use backslash symbol to specify which group (for the set located by your regular expression) you are going to use. In the example above I use two groups. The whole part of the string before original e-mail and the one after that. Then I'm saying to Ant that I'd like to preserve those strings \1 and \2 but change only the string between them.

Thanks