CODEWITHSUNDEEP
windowsbatch-filecmd
avh
avh

Reputation: 188

Echo Without Newline in a Windows Batch `for` Loop

Please note: This question is not about how to echo without a newline. It's about to pipe a variable without a newline and store the result in another variable. Please don't mark this question as duplicate to other questions answering only how to remove newlines!

I have a variable a which I want to pass to a program (let's use more for the sake of this example), and its result should be stored into another variable b. This is to prevent the creation of temporary files. Sticking some answers from other questions here together, this could be achieved by something like this:

FOR /f "tokens=*" %%t IN ('ECHO %a% ^| MORE') DO SET b=%%t

Which works -- BUT will add another newline on my variable! So I tried the following tricks you find on stackoverflow/superuser to prevent the newline. If you do these without the loop, they work perfectly! But once you put them in a loop, they fail:

FOR /f "tokens=*" %%t IN ('ECHO ^| SET /p="%a%" ^| MORE') DO SET b=%%t
FOR /f "tokens=*" %%t IN ('^<NUL SET /p="%a%" ^| MORE') DO SET b=%%t

It will always say The syntax of the command is incorrect. What am I missing? Please help me!

Upvotes: 0

Views: 3562

Answers (1)

MC ND
MC ND

Reputation: 70971

If you run your command 

FOR /f "delims=" %%t IN ('^<NUL SET /p="%a%" ^| more ') DO SET "b=%%t"

with echo ON you will see the equal sign in the set command has vanished, it has been removed by the parser leaving an incorrect command.

You have two options:

FOR /f "delims=" %%t IN ('^<NUL SET /p^="%a%" ^| more ') DO SET "b=%%t"
FOR /f "delims=" %%t IN ('^<NUL SET /p"=%a%" ^| more ') DO SET "b=%%t"

The first one escapes the equal sign. The second one quotes it.

Upvotes: 5

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