# <loadfile>

[This is preliminary documentation and subject to change.]

Load a text file into a single property.

Unless an encoding is specified, the encoding associated with the system's current ANSI code page is used.

An UTF-8, little-endian Unicode, and big-endian Unicode encoded text file is automatically recognized, if the file starts with the appropriate byte order marks.

### Parameters

Attribute | Type | Description | Required
--- | --- | --- | ---
file | file | The file to load. | True
property | string | The name of the property to save the content to. | True
encoding | Encoding | The encoding to use when loading the file. The default is the encoding associated with the system's current ANSI code page. | False
failonerror | bool | Determines if task failure stops the build, or is just reported. The default is true. | False
if | bool | If true then the task will be executed; otherwise, skipped. The default is true. | False
unless | bool | Opposite of `if`. If false then the task will be executed; otherwise, skipped. The default is false. | False
verbose | bool | Determines whether the task should report detailed build log messages. The default is false. | False

### Nested Elements:

#### <filterchain>

The filterchain definition to use.

#### </filterchain>

### Examples

- Load file `message.txt` into property "message".

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

- Load a file using the "latin-1" encoding.

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

- Load a file, replacing all `@NOW@` tokens with the current date/time.

      <loadfile file="token.txt" property="token-file">
          <filterchain>
              <replacetokens>
                  <token key="NOW" value="${datetime::now()}" />
              </replacetokens>
          </filterchain>
      </loadfile>

### Requirements

Assembly: NAnt.Core (0.85.1932.0)