I need to use a lot of characters from character map for this batch file.
Here is part of the batch file I am using:
"C:\v2.vbs" "C:\file.txt" 火 a
Is there a way to have cmd recognize the 火 or any other non-keyboard characters I have in the batch file? This command seems to only work if I don't use special characters.
What else could I use that will run a batch file and accomplish this?
If this
"C:\v2.vbs" "C:\file.txt" <literal UTF-16 charcter> a
means "start v2.vbs with 3 arguments", then you could encode the second parameter like "&Habcd" (quotes needed) and use sC = ChrW(WScript.Arguments(1)) in v2.vbs.
Related
I've written a program that returns keycodes as integers for DOS
but i don't know how to get it's output as a variable.
Note: I'm using MS-DOS 7 / Windows 98, so i can't use FOR /F or SET /P
Does anyone know how i could do that?
A few solutions are described by Eric Pement here. However, for older versions of cmd the author was forced to use external tools.
For example, program tools like STRINGS by Douglas Boling, allows for following code:
echo Greetings! | STRINGS hi=ASK # puts "Greetings!" into %hi%
Same goes for ASET by Richard Breuer:
echo Greetings! | ASET hi=line # puts "Greetings!" into %hi%
One of alternative pure DOS solutions needs the program output to be redirected to the file (named ANSWER.DAT in example below) and then uses a specially prepared batch file. To cite the aforementioned page:
[I]n the batch file we need to be able to issue the command
set MYVAR={the contents of ANSWER.DAT go here}. This is a difficult task, since MS-DOS doesn't offer an easy way to prepend "set MYVAR=" to a file [...]
Normal DOS text files and batch files end all lines with two consecutive bytes: a carriage return (Ctrl-M, hex 0D, or ASCII 13) and a linefeed (Ctrl-J, hex 0A or ASCII 10). In the batch file, you must be able to embed a Ctrl-J in the middle of a line.
Many text editors have a way to do this: via a Ctrl-P followed by Ctrl-J (DOS EDIT with Win95/98, VDE), via a Ctrl-Q prefix (Emacs, PFE), via direct entry with ALT and the numeric keypad (QEdit, Multi-Edit), or via a designated function key (Boxer). Other editors absolutely will not support this (Notepad, Editpad, EDIT from MS-DOS 6.22 or earlier; VIM can insert a linefeed only in binary mode, but not in its normal text mode).
If you can do it, your batch file might look like this:
#echo off
:: assume that the datafile exists already in ANSWER.DAT
echo set myvar=^J | find "set" >PREFIX.DAT
copy PREFIX.DAT+ANSWER.DAT VARIAB.BAT
call VARIAB.BAT
echo Success! The value of myvar is: [%myvar%].
:: erase temp files ...
for %%f in (PREFIX.DAT ANSWER.DAT VARIAB.BAT) do del %%f >NUL
Where you see the ^J on line 3 above, the linefeed should be embedded at that point. Your editor may display it as a square box with an embedded circle.
So in batch there are a lot of special characters that are reserved and cause issues if you use them, if I want to set up a password like so:
SET PASSWORD="123%6!###$^&*_-"
Some of these characters will be stripped after assignment for example the percent '%' character is interpreted as a parameter, is there a way to make batch see that as a string instead of interpreting special characters? no I cannot escape those special characters, this is basically a file that we tell the user to edit teh batch file and set the password.
You could use some magic batch functions to handle with any string, like magic echo.
But I suppose it's better that the user doesn't edit the batch file itself, instead edit a password file, like pwd.txt.
Then you can read this file simply with:
#echo off
setlocal EnableDelayedExpansion
set /p password= < pwd.txt
echo !password!
This read the first line of the file and has no problems with any character.
I am trying to concatenate a set of .txt files using windows command line, into a csv file.
so i use
type *.txt > me_new_file.csv
but a the fields of a given row, which is tab delimited, ends up in one column. How do I take advantage of tab separation in the original text file to create a csv file such that fields are aligned in columns correctly, using one or more command lines? I am thinking there might be something like...
type *.txt > me_new_file.csv delim= ' '
but haven't been able to find anything yet.
Thank You for your help. Would also appreciate if someone could direct me to a related answer.
From the command line you'd have a fairly complicated time of it. The Windows cmd.exe command processor is much, much simpler than dash, ash, or bash, et.al.
Best thing would be to concatenate all of your files into the .csv file, open it in a text editor, and do a global find and replace replacing with ,
Be careful that your other data doesn't have any commas in it.
If the source files are tab delimited, then the output file is also tab delimited. Depending on the software you are using, you should be able load the tab delimited data properly.
Suppose you are using Excel. If the output file has a .csv extension, then Excel will default to comma delimited columns when it opens the file. Of course that does not work for you. But if you rename the file to have some other extension like .txt, then when you open it with Excel, it will open a series of dialog boxes where you can specify the format, including tab delimited.
If you want to keep the .csv extension and have Excel automatically open it properly, then you need to transform the data. This can be done very easily with JREPL.BAT - a hybrid JScript/batch utility that performs a regular expression search and replace on text data. JREPL.BAT is pure script that runs natively on any Windows machine from XP onward.
The following encloses each value in quotes, just in case a value contains a comma literal.
type *.txt 2>nul | jrepl "\t" "\q,\q" /x /jendln "$txt='\x22'+$txt+'\x22'" /o output.csv
Beware: Your use of type *.txt will fail if the last line in any of your source .txt files does not end with a newline. In such a case, the first line of the next file will be appended to the last line of the previous file. Not good.
You can solve that problem by processing each file individually in a FOR loop.
(for %F in (*.txt) do jrepl "\t" "\q,\q" /x /jendln "$txt='\x22'+$txt+'\x22'" /f "%F") >output.csv
The above is designed to run on the command line. If used in a batch script, then a few changes are needed:
(for %%F in (*.txt) do call jrepl "\t" "\q,\q" /x /jendln "$txt='\x22'+$txt+'\x22'" /f "%%F") >output.csv
Note: My answer assumes none of the source files contain quotes. If they do contain quotes, then a more complicated search and replace is required. But it still can be done efficiently with JREPL.
I noticed that cmd seems to accept some characters at the ends of commands. for example all of the following function correctly:
cls.
cls;
cls(
cls\
cls+
cls=
cls\"whatever"
cls\$
cls\#
and these do not:
cls'
cls$
cls)
cls-
cls#
cls\/
Does anybody know why this happens?
Thanks in advance.
It depends on the batch parser.
;,= are general batch delimiters, so you can append/prepend them to the most commands without effect.
;,,= ,=; echo hello
;,cls,;,,
The . dot can be appended to the most commands, as the parser will try to find a file named cls (without extension) cls.exe cls.bat, and when nothing is found then it takes the internal command.
The opening bracket is also a special charcter that the parser removes without error.
The \ backslash is used as path delimiter, so sometimes it works but sometimes you could change even the command.
cls\..\..\..\windows\system32\calc.exe
I'm trying to use the following batch script to concatenate some files together:
copy NUL bin\translate.js
for %%f in (source\Libraries\sprintf.js, source\translate-namespace.js, source\util.js, source\translator.js, source\translate.js) do (
type %%f >> bin\translate.js
echo. >> bin\translate.js
)
However, when I do this, an extra character seems to be printed at the end of each file. When I view the file in ASCII, it is interpreted as these three characters:

Why is this happening? What can I do to fix it?
The  looks like a unicode byte order mark. Is it possible to start with files that are stored without the byte mark? I am not aware of any command line commands that can remove the mark.
The DOS copy command works like the UNIX cat command. That is, you can list multiple source files and one destination file, seperated with + signs.
copy source\Libraries\sprintf.js+source\translate-namespace.js bin\translate.js