DosTips.com

Hello!

I have .txt file: file.txt
This works:
This fails:
returns:
If I want to redirect output to a file:
This does not work either:
Any ideas? Regular expressions maybe?

Thanks.
Saso

You have an odd number of quotes in your request. So everything that follows the third one is passed to findstr as a single argument.
To fix that, you have to ^escape one of the quotes, so that cmd.exe parses it as a normal character:

Great! Thanks. I added extra quote (total of 4) but that didn't work either.

I had problems with
returns no matches, while
returns a match (or more). This does not work:


But this (your version - first quote escaped) works:
Thanks.
Saso

Dave's explanations on SO might be quite interesting in those cases
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/884 ... str-comman

Steffen

I'm not sure what you are attempting with your first two examples. But the last two give expected behavior - you cannot escape a quote once quoting has begun.
So you can escape the first quote or the last quote, but not the middle one.

Regarding my SO post that aGerman linked - the section on escaping quotes is not correct, but does provide useful tips that are generally useful. The actual rules for how FINDSTR treats quotes are horrifically complicated, and are an artifact of how the Microsoft C/C++ library parses command line arguments. Follow the link if you dare

I can follow that article enough to see that there is predictable behavior, but I can't quite wrap my head around it.


Dave Benham

The ^ escaping works outside of quoted strings. Inside quoted strings, ^ is a normal character.
^""" passes """ to the findstr.exe program
"^"" passes "^"" to the findstr.exe program
Same thing for the ^| character in your first example. It's inside a quoted string, so
1) The ^ is useless, as | being inside a quoted string, it needs no escaping,
and 2) the ^ is passed along with the | to findstr, which does not find ^| together in the file.

Thanks.

Saso