Ant ReplaceRegExp

I'm confused. This is getting into conflicts between XML and RegEx expressions and my fuddled brain which doesn't do either terriby well. I want an Ant task to replace a string in a Java source file:

I built the timestamp string, no problem. But the expression to find the old string is giving me fits. I tried

Of course, neither of those is what I want, because I want the quotes in the pattern. Looks like I need to get Regex to accept the spaces, and encode the quotes so that XML won't choke but regex will recognize. Any thoughts?
TIA

IIRC, both single and double quotes are allowed as delimiters in XML, so you could use 'VERSION = "(.*)"'.
Regarding the spaces, I am a little bit confused on what is the problem. But I guess you aren't interested in matching exactly one space character, anyway, so why don't you use 'VERSION\\s*=\\s*"(.*)"'? ('\\s*' stands for any number of white space.)
BTW, your dateformat should probably look "yyMMdd-hhmmss".

Ah, it gets more interesting. The error message comes about when the match WORKS. Here's my current attempt:

Something about the Ant task gets unhappy after finding the match when it attempts the substitution.
[ October 19, 2003: Message edited by: Stan James ]

Ah - do you have backslashes in the datetime?
\x in the replace argument is referring to x-th group in the original pattern!
So
pattern "xy(.*)z" applied on "xyfooz" and replaced by "12\14" would result in "12foo4"! (\0 is referring the whole match).
If this is your problem, escape the backslashes by another one.
[ October 19, 2003: Message edited by: Ilja Preuss ]

Interesting. My ${DateTime} value has only dashes like "2003-10-20-1659". I used it successfully in the filename of my archival zip file.
This works if I substitute in a simple string, like "arf". Wonder if there is something wrong in my use of the ${DateTime} macro?

That's strange. Perhaps you should get sure by putting the replace string into an echo task before the replaceregexp.
What regex engine are you using with ant?

What regex ... really don't know. I'm just using Ant as provided by Eclipse. I am running JDK 1.4.x but don't know if Eclipse or Ant know or care. I think I'll try using some different punctuation characters in my datetime string. Starting with none.

From the Ant docu:

Ant will choose the regular-expression library based on the following algorithm:
If the system property ant.regexp.matcherimpl has been set, it is taken as the name of the class implementing org.apache.tools.ant.util.regexp.RegexpMatcher that should be used.
If it has not been set, first try the JDK 1.4 classes, then jakarta-ORO and finally try jakarta-regexp.

Hmm, with JDK 1.4.2

worked without any problems.
Notice, though, that your regex is greedy - it will replace anything from the first quote to the last one (not the next one)! If I remember correctly, you can change that by using ".*?".