The Styler Task for Ant

The styler task makes useful combinations of XSLT transformations easy to specify in an Ant build file. Like the built-in Ant task style, styler can apply a single transformation to a set of XML files. But it can also:

• handle multiple transformations, in parallel or pipelined.

• enable transformations that split or merge files

• process non-XML files, especially HTML (based on JTidy)

• apply non-XSLT transformation, especially "regular fragmentations"

• use any custom XMLReader or XMLFilter class to handle new file formats and transformation techniques.

The manual page for styler is here. The author is Arnold deVos.

Download

Available for download and use under the LGPL license.

• The jarfile for styler, styler.jar

• A complete distribution including manual page and source as a zipfile..

• The javadoc for the implementation can be browsed here.

Installation

1. Place the styler.jar file in the Ant lib directory.

2. Ensure that the jar files for Xalan 2 are in the Ant lib directory or otherwise on the classpath.

3. If you will be processing HTML files, ensure that the JTidy jar file is also in the Ant lib directory or otherwise on the classpath. Version 04aug2000r6 has been tested with styler.

4. If you will be using regular fragmentations to parse element content, ensure that the fragmentXML jar file is in the Ant lib directory or classpath. Version 0.11 has been tested with styler.

5. Add the following taskdef is to any build.xml file that uses styler:

   <taskdef classname="au.com.Langdale.styler.StylerTask" name="styler"/>

6. You can now use the styler task as described in the manual page.

Changes

20020331

Fixed minor bugs in SOX whitespace handling. Added a basic SOX writer.

20020329

Fixed bug that left output files open and locked. Added new input type SOX: Simple Outline XML.

20020112

Changed the html type to use the HTML output method, correcting problems with character encoding and empty tag generation. Introduced the xhtml type that (imperfectly as yet) generates XHTML and the html4 type which is a synonym for html. HTMLWriter classes renamed for consistency. Set type="xhtml" on the output element for backwards compatibility.

20011114

Added text output and file types txt, sql and text.

20010905

Improved manual page.

20010904

Refactored to allow custom file and transform types to be used. Added regular fragmentations support.

Archive

The previous version of styler:

source-styler-20020112.zip