Double-Quotes in start line of Windows Batch script

Question

I have looked at the answers already provided, but I'm still stuck. Here is what I currently have:

 start "" "C:\Program Files (x86)\Spark\Spark.exe"
 echo Spark started

This works fine. But now I want to pass parameters to the client, which must be wrapped in quotes. I can do the following on the command line:

 "C:\Program Files (x86)\Spark\Spark.exe" "user=%USERNAME%&server=example.org"

And it starts up with the user and server fields filled in.

But when I try to edit the batch script to add those quote-wrapped parameters, I get a variety of errors depending on how I try to add double-quotes and where, etc.

So how would I add a quote-wrapped parameter to the start line?

Update:

I accidentally got it to work, but haven't been able to reproduce it. But it didn't work exactly right. The user name was still blank, but the server was filled in. I forgot to mention that I am using an environment variable for the user name: %USERNAME%

So it might be my problem is that I can't escape quotes and use environment variables?

Final Answer:

It turns out that part of the problem was that I was using the wrong parameter, but originally I had been using the right one, so I didn't notice. From the command line, I should have:

 "C:\Program Files (x86)\Spark\Spark.exe" "username=%USERNAME%&server=example.org"

and so from the batch file, the following works:

 start "" "C:\Program Files (x86)\Spark\Spark.exe" "username=%USERNAME%&server=example.org"
 echo Spark started

Much thanks and points to dcp for getting me to the right answer.

Answer 1

Did you try this?

"C:\Program Files (x86)\Spark\Spark.exe" "\"user=foo&server=example.org\""

This worked when I tried a simple command line test and c++ program (I could see the quotes when I printed the argv[1] argument).

UPDATE: If %USERNAME% has spaces in it, then you need to quote it like this (see below). I think you can remove the other quotes.

"C:\Program Files (x86)\Spark\Spark.exe" user="%USERNAME%"&server=example.org