Escaping Double Quotes in Batch Script

scripting parameters batch-file escaping quotes
eplawless picture eplawless · Feb 18, 2009 · Viewed 157.7k times · Source

How would I go about replacing all of the double quotes in my batch file's parameters with escaped double quotes? This is my current batch file, which expands all of its command line parameters inside the string:

@echo off
call bash --verbose -c "g++-linux-4.1 %*"

It then uses that string to make a call to Cygwin's bash, executing a Linux cross-compiler. Unfortunately, I'm getting parameters like these passed in to my batch file:

"launch-linux-g++.bat" -ftemplate-depth-128 -O3 -finline-functions 
-Wno-inline -Wall  -DNDEBUG   -c 
-o "C:\Users\Me\Documents\Testing\SparseLib\bin\Win32\LinuxRelease\hello.o" 
"c:\Users\Me\Documents\Testing\SparseLib\SparseLib\hello.cpp"

Where the first quote around the first path passed in is prematurely ending the string being passed to GCC, and passing the rest of the parameters directly to bash (which fails spectacularly.)

I imagine if I can concatenate the parameters into a single string then escape the quotes it should work fine, but I'm having difficulty determining how to do this. Does anyone know?

Answer

Eclipse picture Eclipse · Feb 18, 2009

The escape character in batch scripts is ^. But for double-quoted strings, double up the quotes:

"string with an embedded "" character"

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