Problems debugging Java after ANT compile

ANT    

Ok, this one is pretty easy but worth posting. I lost a few hours because of it and I don't want the same to happen to you! Suppose you want to be able to pass a switch into an ANT target which performs a javac to tell it to include debug information or not.

Your properties file will contain properties such as:
The ANT compile target then uses these properties:

However, the debug information is not there when you are debugging.  You run
ant -v compile to get more information. You see:

Now, as we can see the properties are echo'd as expected.  But, the "-g:none" indicates the compile won't include debug information.  Before you tear your hair out, relax! You have just made a very silly mistake we all make at sometime. When ANT reads property files it reads all property values literally. This means there is a difference between "true" and "true ", i.e. boolean properties should not have trailing spaces otherwise they will not be read as boolean properties. This is what happened here.  Ouch!

Ouch - trailing space!

As it states in http://ant.apache.org/manual/Tasks/property.html, regarding property files: "Trailing spaces are not stripped. It may have been what you wanted."

So rip that trailing space and re-run the ant compile target.

You should see:


which means the compiler is going to add lines, vars and source debug information.  Happy debugging!


References:
1. http://ant.apache.org/manual/Tasks/property.html