Windows batch script url decoding

Question

I have a batch script that triggers vlc for me on my network, the problem is it opens based on URLs in a browser. The browser automatically adds the %20 in place of a regular space, and I need to replace this with a regular space again in my batch script before sending the file path on to vlc.

Here is my code;

@echo off
set str=%1
set str=%str:~8%
set str=%str:%%20= %
START /D "C:\Program Files\VideoLAN\VLC\" vlc.exe %str%
pause

It is worth mentioning that this will run on a windows 7 and/or vista system.

Answer 1

@echo off
setlocal enabledelayedexpansion
set str=%~1
set str=%str:~7%
set str=!str:%%20= !
"C:\Program Files\VideoLAN\VLC\vlc.exe" "%str%"
pause

Took the liberty of fixing some other things as well. If the script ran with quotes around the argument it always had a trailing " . Delayed expansion gives you a second set of variable delimiters here which avoids the trouble with the %. Furthermore, start isn't needed as far as I can see, unless you critically depend on VLC having its own directory as its startup path.