## 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

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

Load file message.txt into property "message"; an `<echo>` can print this. This is identical to

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

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

Load a file using the latin-1 encoding

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

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

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

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

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