Subversion has the ability to substitute keywords—pieces of useful, dynamic information about a versioned file—into the contents of the file itself. Keywords generally describe information about the last time the file was known to be modified. Because this information changes each time the file changes, and more importantly, just after the file changes, it is a hassle for any process except the version control system to keep the data completely up-to-date. Left to human authors, the information would inevitably grow stale.

For example, say you have a document in which you would like to display the last date on which it was modified. You could burden every author of that document to, just before committing their changes, also tweak the part of the document that describes when it was last changed. But sooner or later, someone would forget to do that. Instead simply ask Subversion to perform keyword substitution on the LastChangedDate keyword. You control where the keyword is inserted into your document by placing a keyword anchor at the desired location in the file. This anchor is just a string of text formatted as $ KeywordName $.

All keywords are case-sensitive where they appear as anchors in files: you must use the correct capitalization in order for the keyword to be expanded. You should consider the value of the svn:keywords property to be case-sensitive too—certain keyword names will be recognized regardless of case, but this behavior is deprecated.

Subversion defines the list of keywords available for substitution. That list contains the following five keywords, some of which have aliases that you can also use:

Simply adding keyword anchor text to your file does nothing special. Subversion will never attempt to perform textual substitutions on your file contents unless explicitly asked to do so. After all, you might be writing a document ^[36] about how to use keywords, and you don't want Subversion to substitute your beautiful examples of un-substituted keyword anchors!

To tell Subversion whether or not to substitute keywords on a particular file, we again turn to the property-related subcommands. The svn:keywords property, when set on a versioned file, controls which keywords will be substituted on that file. The value is a space-delimited list of the keyword names or aliases found in the previous table.

For example, say you have a versioned file named weather.txt that looks like this:

Here is the latest report from the front lines.
$LastChangedDate$
$Rev$
Cumulus clouds are appearing more frequently as summer approaches.

With no svn:keywords property set on that file, Subversion will do nothing special. Now, let's enable substitution of the LastChangedDate keyword.

$ svn propset svn:keywords "Date Author" weather.txt
property 'svn:keywords' set on 'weather.txt'
$

Now you have made a local property modification on the weather.txt file. You will see no changes to the file's contents (unless you made some of your own prior to setting the property). Notice that the file contained a keyword anchor for the Rev keyword, yet we did not include that keyword in the property value we set. Subversion will happily ignore requests to substitute keywords that are not present in the file, and will not substitute keywords that are not present in the svn:keywords property value.

Immediately after you commit this property change, Subversion will update your working file with the new substitute text. Instead of seeing your keyword anchor $LastChangedDate$, you'll see its substituted result. That result also contains the name of the keyword, and continues to be bounded by the dollar sign ($) characters. And as we predicted, the Rev keyword was not substituted because we didn't ask for it to be.

Note also that we set the svn:keywords property to “Date Author” yet the keyword anchor used the alias $LastChangedDate$ and still expanded correctly.

Here is the latest report from the front lines.
$LastChangedDate: 2002-07-22 21:42:37 -0700 (Mon, 22 Jul 2002) $
$Rev$
Cumulus clouds are appearing more frequently as summer approaches.

If someone else now commits a change to weather.txt, your copy of that file will continue to display the same substituted keyword value as before—until you update your working copy. At that time the keywords in your weather.txt file will be re-substituted with information that reflects the most recent known commit to that file.

Subversion 1.2 introduced a new variant of the keyword syntax which brought additional, useful—though perhaps atypical—functionality. You can now tell Subversion to maintain a fixed length (in terms of the number of bytes consumed) for the substituted keyword. By using a double-colon (::) after the keyword name, followed by a number of space characters, you define that fixed width. When Subversion goes to substitute your keyword for the keyword and its value, it will essentially replace only those space characters, leaving the overall width of the keyword field unchanged. If the substituted value is shorter than the defined field width, there will be extra padding characters (spaces) at the end of the substituted field; if it is too long, it is truncated with a special hash (#) character just before the final dollar sign terminator.

For example, say you have a document in which you have some section of tabular data reflecting the document's Subversion keywords. Using the original Subversion keyword substitution syntax, your file might look something like:

$Rev$:     Revision of last commit
$Author$:  Author of last commit
$Date$:    Date of last commit

Now, that looks nice and tabular at the start of things. But when you then commit that file (with keyword substitution enabled, of course), you see:

$Rev: 12 $:     Revision of last commit
$Author: harry $:  Author of last commit
$Date: 2006-03-15 02:33:03 -0500 (Wed, 15 Mar 2006) $:    Date of last commit

The result is not so beautiful. And you might be tempted to then adjust the file after the substitution so that it again looks tabular. But that only holds as long as the keyword values are the same width. If the last committed revision rolls into a new place value (say, from 99 to 100), or if another person with a longer username commits the file, stuff gets all crooked again. However, if you are using Subversion 1.2 or better, you can use the new fixed-length keyword syntax, define some field widths that seem sane, and now your file might look like this:

$Rev::               $:  Revision of last commit
$Author::            $:  Author of last commit
$Date::              $:  Date of last commit

You commit this change to your file. This time, Subversion notices the new fixed-length keyword syntax, and maintains the width of the fields as defined by the padding you placed between the double-colon and the trailing dollar sign. After substitution, the width of the fields is completely unchanged—the short values for Rev and Author are padded with spaces, and the long Date field is truncated by a hash character:

$Rev:: 13            $:  Revision of last commit
$Author:: harry      $:  Author of last commit
$Date:: 2006-03-15 0#$:  Date of last commit

The use of fixed-length keywords is especially handy when performing substitutions into complex file formats that themselves use fixed-length fields for data, or for which the stored size of a given data field is overbearingly difficult to modify from outside the format's native application (such as for Microsoft Office documents).