Quotes around comma-separated command-line parameters

Hi Andrew,

A recent build update added automatic quotes around passed command-line parameters from column values. This causes me issues with some of the scripts I use. Where a column may have two values comma-separated, these were passed as two parameters to my applications. Now with quotes, my applications see it as one parameter. Is there a way of turning off the quotes in this instance?

Many thanks
John

Hi John,
Could you please post here a specific example (possibly with screen shots) where it breaks the functionality?

Hi Andrew.
The best way I can illustrate is this.
The Logged user column's can carry multiple values, Esp Terminal servers. So Passing the command line value [Logged User] could have two scenarios:

Scenario 1
cmd /c mybatch.bat user.name1,user.name2
The above command will pass %1 and %2 as separate parameters.

Scenario 2
cmd /c mybatch.bat "user.name1,user.name2"
This above command will pass %1 as "user.name1,user.name2" there will be no second parameter

As you can see, I would not want Scenario 2, as my batch file will want to process each user individually.

Hope this explains it.

Regards
John

What about?: cmd /c mybatch.bat "user.name1","user.name2"

What John says is that in the past versions using the [Logged User] column substitute, passed the following as command line arguments:

user1, user2, user3

While in the latest version it became

"user1, user2, user3"

So the batch file no longer recognises these tokens as separate arguments.

This can be desirable in some cases and undesirable in others. I am not yet sure how to make it possible to use both.

How about: ""user1", "user2", "user3"" or "'user1', 'user2', 'user3'" or '"user1", "user2", "user3"'

Is that the best of both worlds??

Maybe a tick box in the Option / Applications tab to turn on or off quotes for parameters. Or do you think there may be a silver bullet approach?

Hi Andrew. I still have issues with the Automatic Quotes, is there any plans to make this optional?
Best
John

Hi John!

Well, adding a tick box or a special character to avoid quoting doesn't seem to be a good solution.

I'd suggest to de-quote the string and split it in your batch file like this:

@set users=%1
@set users=%users:"=%
@for %%a in (%users%) do @echo %%a

When called as cmd.exe /k test.bat [logged user] it prints a list of users with one user name per line.

You can easily split quoted string back into separate tokens, assuming there's no extraneous separators.
This script will demonstrate the technique:

@ECHO OFF
ECHO Test 1
CALL :TEST x1,y2,z3
ECHO Test 2
CALL :TEST "x1,y2,z3"
ECHO Test 3
CALL :TEST "x=1,y=2,z=3"
GOTO :EOF

:TEST
CALL :SPLIT %1
ECHO Splitting...
CALL :SPLIT %~1
GOTO :EOF

:SPLIT
ECHO 1:%~1
GOTO :EOF

(Yes, CMD is THAT bogus.)

Thanks for your response Andrew. I'll amend my scripts going forward. I did enjoy the simplicity in the way the comma automatically split the arguments, and was easy to manually add a quote if needed, but I guess you can't keep everyone happy.

John