Concatenating multiple files into one using gradle

Old Forum Archive
1

Hi,

Forgive me in case the terminology is not correct as I am new to gradle and migrating one ant based build to gradle!

I want to concatenate multiple files into one using gradle, I know that I can call ant and do that but I want to utilize gradle powerful copy task to achieve this. To do this I was thinking to extend Copy task itself but I didn’t get any solid article in google explaining how to extend any core task.

My new task will have another property which will define target/concatenated file name where as source file names can still be fetched using existing ‘from’ clousures!

Thanks, Anshuman

2

I’d just write my own custom task in Groovy that knows how to concatinate files. You can either put this code into your build script, use the ‘buildSrc’ project or write a plugin if you want to share the code among projects. Here’s an example:

class ConcatFiles extends DefaultTask {
    @InputFiles
    FileCollection files
          @OutputFile
    File target
          @TaskAction
    void concat() {
        target.withWriter { writer ->
            files.each { file ->
                file.withReader { reader ->
                    writer << reader << '\n'
                }
            }
        }
    }
}

To use this task in your build, you can write an enhance task and assign the desired input and output files:

task concat(type: ConcatFiles) {
    files = files('test1.txt', 'test2.txt', 'test3.txt')
    target = file("$buildDir/concat.txt")
}
2 Likes
3

Yes, this is one of the approach to do this, but as I mentioned I was thinking if I can utilize ‘from’, ‘include’ & ‘exclude’ also, something like -

task concat(type: ConcatFiles) {
  from(sourceSets.main.java.srcDirs) {
    include 'file-1.properties'
    include 'file-2.properties'
    include 'file-3.properties'
    concatTo "$buildDir/concat.txt"
  }
}

This will give me luxury to add regular expressions as well as inclusions and exclusions same as it works for Copy task.

There is another reason as to why I want this type of approach because I want to perform multiple concatenation under one task!

Thanks, Anshuman

1 Like