asked on

String concatenation in Windows batch file?

If I have environmental variables like:

X3DESTDIR="C:\Destination Folder"
X4DESTFIL="\zzzfiles\SubfolderLevel2\SubfolderLevel3\file 553.zzz"

how can the two strings be concatenated. The use of percent signs like

SET FINAL_DEST=%DESTDIR%%DESTFIL%

results in extranneous quotes, i.e.

FINAL_DEST="C:\Destination Folder""\zzzfiles\SubfolderLevel2\SubfolderLevel3\file 553.zzz"

How to eliminate the extra quotes ("") in the middle of the result?

ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION

Zyloch

membership

This solution is only available to members.

To access this solution, you must be a member of Experts Exchange.

Start Free Trial

Zyloch

Ahh, wait, disregard that last not sure why you need the quotes statement, I understand

Regards...

dpichett

ASKER

Hello Zyloch,

Thanks for the feedback, I don't want to strip out the quotes, I need the quotes to handle spaces in the folder and directory names.

Essentially, I'm looking for syntax that will take the strings "John Q." and " Public" and produce "John Q. Public", rather than "John Q."" Public"

Further thoughts?

SOLUTION

SteveGTR

membership

This solution is only available to members.

To access this solution, you must be a member of Experts Exchange.

Start Free Trial

SOLUTION

brianadkins

membership

This solution is only available to members.

To access this solution, you must be a member of Experts Exchange.

Start Free Trial

SOLUTION

For-Soft

membership

This solution is only available to members.

To access this solution, you must be a member of Experts Exchange.

Start Free Trial

brianadkins

Similarly, my solution above removes all the quotes from both variables, slaps the variables together, and then puts quotes back on the ends.

-Brian

For-Soft

The advantage of this solution is:
If the FINAL_DEST variable does not have any "" substring it will do nothing. If "" substring exists it will be deleted.

SteveGTR

My solution is overkill, but I love overkill :)

Also, I neglected to slap quotes back on results:

call :CONCAT FINAL_DEST %X3DESTDIR% %X4DESTFIL%

set FINAL_DEST="%FINAL_DEST%"

echo FINAL_DEST=%FINAL_DEST%

For-Soft

After some thought Brian's idea has an advantage also. If only one string has quotes it will work fine. Mine will do nothing.

Better is to have quotes always, than not to have quotes when needed.

dpichett

ASKER

thanks to all.

ultimately, stripping out all quotes (including valid and extranneous) and then re-including quotes around any subsequent use of the variable looks like it will do the trick.