Escaping strings in a Windows Batch For Loop

Question

I'm having problems with the following code:

FOR /f "tokens=*" %%A in (%MYFILE_PATH%) do (
    [other stuff]
    echo %%A>> "%MYFILE_PATH%.scratch"
)

The file being read has XML in it and when < and > signs are read, the script throws errors. How can I escape the contents of %%A to safely echo to the output file? I don't want to put double quotes around it since it will then echo the quotes too.

Thanks

This code doesn't fail with <> characters, as echo %%A is safe against special characters (only the exlamation mark can cause problems). I assume your real code call functions or copy %%A into other variables — jeb
– jeb, Commented Sep 8, 2011 at 6:33

Anthony Miller · Accepted Answer · 2011-09-07 20:36:46Z

1

FOR /f "tokens=*" %%A in (%MYFILE_PATH%) do (
    [other stuff]
    (echo %%A)>>"%MYFILE_PATH%.scratch"
)

When appending the contents of %%A into another file, all that you are essentially doing is copying the file.

EDIT

 FOR /f "tokens=* delims=" %%A in (%MYFILE_PATH%) do (
    [other stuff]
    (echo %%A)>>"%MYFILE_PATH%.scratch"
)

edited Sep 7, 2011 at 20:36

answered Sep 7, 2011 at 18:54

Anthony Miller

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6 Comments

George Hernando Over a year ago

Thanks! With this there is no error any more. But the whitespace in the line being copied is getting stripped. Any way to prevent that?

George Hernando Over a year ago

It also seems to strip some other characters. Like

George Hernando Over a year ago

It also seems to strip some other characters. Like the line: <!DOCTYPE beans PUBLIC '-//SPRING//DTD BEAN//EN' 'xxx.org/dtd/my-beans.dtd'> becomes <//www.xxx.org/dtd/my-beans.dtd'>

Anthony Miller Over a year ago

edited my answer. The reason it was not working correctly is because in FOR /F loops, white space is the delimeter so it is automatically removed unless you specify nothing as the delims... so is a semicolon.

George Hernando Over a year ago

Never got it fully working. Came up with a different approach to not do it within a batch file.

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