CODEWITHSUNDEEP
regexwindowsdiffgnuwin32cmdline-args
JavaMan
JavaMan

Reputation: 5044

How to Specify ^ " white-space At the Same Time in Windows Command Prompt

I have difficulties understanding how to specify special characters ^ and " as parameters in windows command prompt. I am using gnuwin32's diff in Win 7 . It has a -I option that accepts a regular expression from the command line. I want to invoke diff in a batch file specifying a regular expression. However, my regular expression is a complex one with ^ " and white-space special characters within it:

^[ \t]*#[ \t]*include[ \t]+"c:\\program files

I'm not able to understand Windows's rules for specifying special characters in the command line in this case which has special rules regarding ^ and ". How am i going to specify the above regular expression in the command line?

I guess it should look like this:

diff -I "^[ \t]*#[ \t]*include[ \t]+"c:\\program files" file1 file2

But the " in the middle mess up the whole thing. How should I deal with the ^ and "?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 370

Answers (1)

JavaMan
JavaMan

Reputation: 5044

After some research and testing, this should be the regex required: 

diff -I "^[[:space:]]*#[[:space:]]*include[[:space:]]\+\"c:\\\\program file" file1 file2

For one thing, diff is using grep style regex which doesn't support the Perl style \t sequence. We need to use \" to specify a literal ".

Also, do not use windows batch file to test the parameter passed to a program as I did.

In other words, never think this batch file diff.bat with a few echos can help you test which command line arguments to use:

echo %1
echo %2
echo %3
echo %4

Write and compile a program for this and have it dump the command line arguments.

Upvotes: 0

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