escaping a dollar in the middle of an ant property

Question

I have a property whose value contains a $. I'd like to use this property as a regexp in a propertyregexp. Ant appears to resolve the property as a paramater to the propertyregexp, but then the dollar gets interpreted as a regexp symbol.

Example:

<property name="a" value="abc$" />
<property name="b" value="xyz" />
<path id="paths">
  <pathelement location="abc$/def" />
  <pathelement location="abc$/ghi" />
</path>
<pathconvert property="list" refid="paths" pathsep="${line.separator}" dirsep="/" />
<propertyregex property="list" input="${list}" override="true" regexp="${a}(.*)" replace="${b}\1" />
<echo message="${list}" />

I'd like to get the pair xyz/def and xyz/ghi. Is this possible? I'm using Ant 1.8.

Answer 1

oops somehow i didn't read your comment in all detail, but nevertheless, here's a working toy solution ;-)

<project name="project" default="main">

    <taskdef resource="net/sf/antcontrib/antlib.xml"/>

 <property name="a" value="abc$" />
 <property name="b" value="xyz" />
 <path id="paths">
  <pathelement location="abc$/def" />
  <pathelement location="abc$/ghi" />
 </path>

 <target name="main">

  <pathconvert property="list" refid="paths" pathsep="${line.separator}" dirsep="/" />
  <propertyregex property="a" input="${a}" override="true" regexp="\$" replace="" />
  <propertyregex property="list" input="${list}" override="true" regexp="\$" replace="" />
  <propertyregex property="list" input="${list}" override="true" regexp="${a}" replace="${b}" />
  <echo>${list}</echo>
 </target>

</project>

result :

main:
     [echo] /foobar/AntScripts/xyz/def
     [echo] /foobar/AntScripts/xyz/ghi
BUILD SUCCESSFUL

IMO, using properties with '$' in it is calling for trouble, is there no other way ?!

Best Regards, Gilbert