## LoadFile

### Description

Specialization of loadresource that works on files exclusively and provides a srcFile attribute for convenience. Unless an encoding is specified, the encoding of the current locale is used.

If the resource content is empty (maybe after processing a `filterchain`) the property is not set.

### Parameters

Attribute | Description | Required
--- | --- | ---
srcFile | source file | Yes
property | property to save to | Yes
encoding | encoding to use when loading the file | No
failonerror | Whether to halt the build on failure | No; default true
quiet | Do not display a diagnostic message (unless Apache Ant has been invoked with the `-verbose` or `-debug` switches) or modify the exit status to reflect an error. Setting this to true implies setting failonerror to false. Since Ant 1.7.0. | No; default false

The LoadFile task supports nested FilterChains.

### Examples

Load file `message.txt` into property `message`; an `<echo>` can print this.

    <loadfile property="message"
              srcFile="message.txt"/>

The above is identical to

    <loadresource property="message">
        <file file="message.txt"/>
    </loadresource>

Load a file using the Latin-1 encoding

    <loadfile property="encoded-file"
              srcFile="loadfile.xml"
              encoding="ISO-8859-1"/>

Load a file, don't fail if it is missing (a message is printed, though)

    <loadfile property="optional.value"
              srcFile="optional.txt"
              failonerror="false"/>

Load a property which can be used as a parameter for another task (in this case `mail`), merging lines to ensure this happens.

    <loadfile property="mail.recipients"
              srcFile="recipientlist.txt">
        <filterchain>
            <striplinebreaks/>
        </filterchain>
    </loadfile>

Load an XML file into a property, expanding all properties declared in the file in the process.

    <loadfile property="system.configuration.xml"
              srcFile="configuration.xml">
        <filterchain>
            <expandproperties/>
        </filterchain>
    </loadfile>