How to escape path containing spaces

Question

To pass a path with spaces to .NET console application you should escape it. Probably not escape but surround with double quotes:

myapp.exe --path C:\Program Files\MyApp`

becomes

new string[] { "--path", "C:\Program", "Files\MyApp" }

but

myapp.exe --path "C:\Program Files\MyApp"

becomes

new string[] { "--path", "C:\Program Files\MyApp" }

and it works fine and you can parse that easily.

I want to extend the set of parameters given with an addition one and start a new process with the resulting set of parameters:

new ProcessStartInfo(
    Assembly.GetEntryAssembly().Location,
    String.Join(" ", Enumerable.Concat(args, new[] { "--flag" })))

This becomes myapp.exe --path C:\Program Files\MyApp --flag where path drops its escaping.

How to workaround it with common solution? (without searching each parameter's value requiring escaping and quoting it manually)

Solution 1

I don't think it is possible since the space is the delimiter for CLI arguments so they would need to be escaped.

You could extract this into an extension method quite nicely so you can just run args.Escape() in your code above.

public static string[] Escape(this string[] args)
{
    return args.Select(s => s.Contains(" ") ? string.Format("\"{0}\"", s) : s).ToArray();
}

Solution 2

Just quote every parameter. This...

myapp.exe "--path" "C:\Program Files\MyApp" "--flag"

...is a perfectly valid command line and does exactly what you want.

Comments

[abatishchev]

Great! Thanks! btw, I think there is no need to string[] and IEnumerable<string> suites here well

[abatishchev]

i.e. Select(s => String.Format("\"{0}\"", s)). Looks great but @amarsuperstar's solution I like little bit more :) Thank you, Heinzi

[EdmundYeung99]

doesn't work in a case where the path has a trailing "\" such as "C:\Program Files\MyApp\"

[Can Sahin]

@EdmundYeung99: Yes, that's a really tricky issue. The following question contains a few attempts to work around the problem: stackoverflow.com/q/5510343/87698