title: Pass semicolon in Ant as a parameter
body: <p>I want to pass ";;;" string as a string parameter in my Ant task:  </p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;mytask param=";;;"/&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>but Ant consider semicolon as a special symbol and raises an error  </p>
  
  <p><code>java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: Illegal group reference</code></p>
  
  <p>how can I escape ; symbol to pass it to Ant?  </p>
  
  <p>p.s. also I found that I can't pass { symbol,<br>
  so I wonder what's the common way to escape characters in Ant?<br>
  I've tried "$;$;$;" but it's not working for me</p>
  
  <p>UPDATE: 
  sample code:</p>
  
  <pre><code>public class MyTask extends Task {
      private String value;
      public void setValue(String value) {
          this.value = value;
      }
  
      public void execute() {
          System.out.println(value);
      }
  }
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>and ant task:</p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;taskdef name="mytask" classpath="build/lib/CustomTasks.jar"
     classname="MyTask"/&gt;
  &lt;mytask value=";;;"/&gt;
  </code></pre>