How to: Display an Item List Separated with Commas

Note

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When you work with item lists in Microsoft Build Engine (MSBuild), it is sometimes useful to display the contents of those item lists in a way that is easy to read. Or, you might have a task that takes a list of items separated with a special separator string. In both of these cases, you can specify a separator string for an item list.

Separating Items in a List with Commas

By default, MSBuild uses semicolons to separate items in a list. For example, consider a Message element with the following value:

<Message Text="This is my list of TXT files: @(TXTFile)"/>

When the @(TXTFile) item list contains the items App1.txt, App2.txt, and App3.txt, the message is:

This is my list of TXT files: App1.txt;App2.txt;App3.txt

If you want to change the default behavior, you can specify your own separator. The syntax for specifying an item list separator is:

@(ItemListName, '<separator>')

The separator can be either a single character or a string and must be enclosed in single quotes.

To insert a comma and a space between items

  • Use item notation similar to the following:

    @(TXTFile, ', ')

Example

In this example, Exec task runs the findstr tool to find specified text strings in the file, Phrases.txt. In the findstr command, literal search strings are indicated by the /c: switch, so the item separator, /c: is inserted between items in the @(Phrase) item list.

For this example, the equivalent command-line command is:

findstr /i /c:hello /c:world /c:msbuild phrases.txt

<Project DefaultTargets = "Find"  
    xmlns="https://schemas.microsoft.com/developer/msbuild/2003" >  
  
    <ItemGroup>  
        <Phrase Include="hello"/>  
        <Phrase Include="world"/>  
        <Phrase Include="msbuild"/>  
    </ItemGroup>  
  
    <Target Name = "Find">  
        <!-- Find some strings in a file -->  
        <Exec Command="findstr /i /c:@(Phrase, ' /c:') phrases.txt"/>  
    </Target>  
</Project>  

See Also

MSBuild Reference
Items