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how to deal with quotes in a string when passing that string to the command line

Answer 1

A:

The windows command line doesn't use \ as an escape for a quote, it uses a redundant quote,

so you want to send "John ""The Man"" Doe" which you get in C# by escaping each quote

string ARTIST = "John \"\"The Man\"\" Doe"

John Knoeller 2010-02-01 22:58:58

thanks but the string I retrieve from elsewhere, it already comes as `"John \"The Man\" Doe"` (for example)

Dave 2010-02-01 23:00:36

it is being fed into the LAME.exe mp3 encoder and the \ escape character works when i tried manually

Dave 2010-02-01 23:01:25

The method of escaping quotes is application specific, but most applications use the \ escape characters (C#'s `Main(string[])` uses \ escape characters, for example).

Ruben 2010-02-01 23:04:59

yes, but most command line parsers _dont_ because \ is the path separator in windows.

John Knoeller 2010-02-01 23:17:51

If you read the docs on how `Environment.GetCommandLineArgs` works, you'll see it has some provisions on how this works. So only \" is treated as an escape, but C:\ is not. (IIRC this is the same for MS VC++.) See http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.environment.getcommandlineargs.aspx

Ruben 2010-02-01 23:44:53

Answer 2

A:

The basic idea does seem to be correct, but did you also add the surrounding quotes, i.e.,

"\"" + ARTIST.Replace("\"", "\\\"") + "\""

Also, note that you'll need three backslashes rather than two to escape \"; the compiler would complain if you didn't.

Ruben 2010-02-01 22:59:44

Answer 3

+2 A:

Make sure you are doing:

ARTIST = ARTIST.Replace("\"","\\\"");

Instead of just:

ARTIST.Replace("\"","\\\"");

Is this the case already?

Nick Craver 2010-02-01 23:00:38

lol thank you! d'oh! :)

Dave 2010-02-01 23:03:31

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how to deal with quotes in a string when passing that string to the command line

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