In a previous post we learned how to include parts of a document in the generated output. The included parts are defined using tags. The start of a tag is defined in a comment with the format tag::_tagName_[] and the end has the format end::_tagName_[]. Next we must use the tags attribute for the include macro followed by the tagName. If we don’t want to include a tag we must prefix it with an exclamation mark (!).

Suppose we have an external Java source we want to include in our Asciidoctor document.

package mrhaki;

// tag::singletonAnnotation[]
@Singleton
// end::singletonAnnotation[]
public class Sample {
    public String greeting() {
        return "Hello Asciidoctor";
    }
}

In the following sample Asciidoctor document we include Sample.java, but we don’t want to include the text enclosed with the singletonAnnotation tag. So we use tags=!singletonAnnotaion with the include macro:

= Sample

To NOT include sections enclosed with tags we must use `tags=!` in the `include` directive.

[source,java]
------
include::Sample.java[tags=!singletonAnnotation]
------

When we transform our Asciidoctor markup to HTML we get the following result:

Written with Asciidoctor 1.5.6.1.

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