Ampersand problem...

I often download files from an external source on the web, and these files often have an ampersand ("&") in their name (as an example, "Tom & Jerry.doc") Over time I have had a gradually increasing number of processes that I want to perform on these files, and in all cases I write a C++ program to do it because of the (apparent?) inability of TCC to handle ampersands in character strings in batch files (a problem that C++ of course, doesn't have). But the point is that it would often be much quicker, easier, and simpler to simply write a .bat file to do the processing that I want, but again, TCC can't handle ampersands in character strings in batch files. So the question: Is there a way around this?

Charles,

Here's the contents of a very simple .bat file that illustrates the problem:

Echo %@Path["C & D & E & F & G\H & I & J & K.txt"]
Echo %@FileName["C & D & E & F & G\H & I & J & K.txt"]

In the real program these paths\filenames are read from an external file with @FileRead. And note that in this example, the path\filename is enclosed in double quotes.

Here's the (complete!) results of executing the above .bat file:

Echo C
C
D
TCC: Z:\AmpersandProblem.bat [1] Unknown command "D"
E
TCC: Z:\AmpersandProblem.bat [1] Unknown command "E"
F
TCC: Z:\AmpersandProblem.bat [1] Unknown command "F"
G\
TCC: (Sys) Z:\AmpersandProblem.bat [1] The system cannot find the
file specified.
"G\"
Echo H
H
I
TCC: Z:\AmpersandProblem.bat [2] Unknown command "I"
J
TCC: Z:\AmpersandProblem.bat [2] Unknown command "J"
K.txt
TCC: Z:\AmpersandProblem.bat [2] Unknown command "K.txt"

I will note that it was not I who put the ampersands in the file names (by now I know better than to do that) - that is the way they "arrived" from an external website, so there's no way (other than writing a C++/Visual Basic program) that I can conveniently get rid of the ampersands.

- Dan

On Tue, 10 Aug 2010 12:05:43 -0400, mathewsdw <>
wrote:

|Quote any filename that contains ampersands or other special characters. Quote any filename that might contain ampersands or other special characters.

You can also simply turn off the special meaning of the ampersand with
SETDOS /X-5. One can almost always do without compound commands. But
SETDOS /X-5 will also turn off the special meaning of "|" (for pipes)
and that may be undesirable.

Alternatively, you could also temporarily set the compound command
character to something not likely to be in the text you're working
with, say, SETDOS /C~ or SETDOS /C!

On Tue, 10 Aug 2010 14:46:46 -0400, vefatica <>
wrote:

|Alternatively, you could also temporarily set the compound command
|character to something not likely to be in the text you're working
|with, say, SETDOS /C~ or SETDOS /C!

... or even to something pretty darned sure not to be in the text, say
SETDOS /C%@char[132] (temporarily, of course).

Thank you, Charles! I would have never guessed - and since I'm visually impaired (that's why this large font) so that it's hard for me to read the help file and having no expectation that the solution would be there, I didn't look. (I also must admit that your solution doesn't quite make total sense to me, but it works so who cares!!!)

Thanks for your suggestions!!! These thing are good to know!

Frankly, Charles, that's a little too obscure!!!!!

On Tue, 10 Aug 2010 16:04:10 -0400, Charles Dye
<> wrote:

|... or even to something pretty darned sure not to be in the text, say
|SETDOS /C%@char[132] (temporarily, of course).
|---End Quote---
|That should work even in 4DOS. But you can get much more obscure in Take Command; how about SETDOS /C0x0569 or SETDOS /C0x13FE ?

Don't forget it's TCC (not TCMD) that's handling the command
separator. There's no problem with that in a bare console.

Code:

v:\> SETDOS /C0x0569

v:\> echo foo %@char[0x0569] echo bar
foo
bar

And you can access it more readily.

Code:

v:\> echo foo %+ echo bar
foo
bar