Breaking down WinMain's cmdLine in old style main()'s arguments

Question

I want to convert WinMain's cmdLine argument to argc and argv so I can use the argument parsing function I wrote for console applications.

This would be trivial except that I want to support "quotes" too. For example:

test.exe test1 test2 "testing testing"

should be

argv[0] = "test.exe"; argv[1] = "test1"; argv[2] = "test2"; argv[3] = "testing testing";

I realize that cmdLine doesn't have the program name (the argv[0]); this doesn't matter I can use a dummy value.

I was thinking of doing it with a regex, (("[^"]+")\s+)|(([^\s]+)\s*) I'm not sure how well it would work though.. Probably not very well? Is there any function to do that in the windows api? Thanks

Answer 1

CommandLineToArgvW looks like it would be helpful here.

Answer 2

If you are using Microsoft compiler, there are public symbols __argc, __argv and __wargv defined in stdlib.h. This also applies to MinGW that uses Microsoft runtime libraries.