Unable to fetch command line arguments properly in C#

Question

In c#.Net I am not able to fetch the commandline argument properly. It has problems in case i give the command like:

myProgram.exe "c:\inputfolder\" "d:\output.txt"

due to the backslash character(which i think acting as an escape character) in the args[] array i am getting only one argument instead of two It works fine if i gave without backslash:

myProgram.exe "c:\inputfolder" "d:\output.txt"

or without double quotes:

myProgram.exe c:\inputfolder\ "d:\output.txt"

Answer 1

This is a well known parsing problem and there isn't a whole lot you can do about it besides get the whole command line as a single string and parse it yourself.

Answer 2

I've never experienced such a problem but in case you like to parse the command line by your self use System.Environment.CommandLine to get it.

Answer 3

The backslash is escaping the quote character in the shell. You have to use an extra backslash:

myProgram.exe "c:\inputfolder\\" "d:\output.txt"

You can use the following short sample program to test command line parsing:

using System;

class Program
{
    static void Main(string[] args)
    {
        for (int i = 0; i < args.Length; i++)
        {
            Console.WriteLine(string.Format("Argument {0}: {1}", i, args[i]));
        }
    }
}