Backslash treated as escape char in command line args

[Philip Semanchuk]

Hi all,
Dotnet seems to be misparsing my command line args and I'd like to hear
about other people's experience with this. Everything is fine until I
mix backslashes and quotes in the args to my console app, e.g.:
myapp "c:\program files\" /foo /bar

Dotnet interprets the backslash preceding the quote as an escape
character with the result that args[0] comes through with the arguments
treated as one long string and the leading quote and second backslash
stripped, as follows:
c:\program files" /foo /bar

Other apps seem to handle such arguments as I expect. For instance, if I
start Word with this command line:
winword "c:\program files\"

Word responds with the error message that it can't open the file
C:\PROGRAM FILES\ which means it correctly interpreted the backslash as
a part of the path, and not as an escape character. Notepad behaves
similarly. In my opinion, this is a bug in Microsoft's Dotnet
implementation. Opinions appreciated.

I tried this under both C# and VB using both the args[] array passed in
through Main() and also with System.EnvironmentGetCommandLineArgs();
same results in all contexts. It'd be interesting to try this using Mono
under Linux where backslash isn't the path separator.

Thanks
Philip

 

[Ed Kaim [MSFT]]

Someone else posted about this last week, so I tried it out in VB .NET, C#,
and a Win32 C++ app. In all cases, backslashes in the command line were
treated like escape characters, meaning that you'd have to do your own
parsing. However, today I tried it again before replying to your post and
they all worked as they were supposed to. I have no idea why. The only thing
I can think of is that I autoinstall updates from Windows Update, so maybe
this was fixed in the past week.

 

[Shailesh]

Try like this

"C:\\Program Files\\Someexe.exe"

or
just put @ before your "" like this.
@"C:\Program Files\Someexe.exe"

HTH.

 

[Philip Semanchuk]

Someone else posted about this last week, so I tried it out in VB .NET, C#,
and a Win32 C++ app. In all cases, backslashes in the command line were
treated like escape characters, meaning that you'd have to do your own
parsing. However, today I tried it again before replying to your post and
they all worked as they were supposed to. I have no idea why. The only thing
I can think of is that I autoinstall updates from Windows Update, so maybe
this was fixed in the past week.

THanks, Ed, for the info and diagnosis.

Philip

 

[Philip Semanchuk]

Try like this

"C:\\Program Files\\Someexe.exe"

or
just put @ before your "" like this.
@"C:\Program Files\Someexe.exe"

Shailesh,
Thanks but my problem isn't with writing strings inside C# code. It has
to do with invoking a dotnet application from the command line, and how
those command line arguments get parsed incorrectly by the dotnet framework.

Philip