Prevent extra space when setting variable on Windows command line

Question

When setting a variable like this:

> set foo=hello && echo test

then the value of the variable foo contains an extra unwanted space:

> echo "%foo%"
"hello "

How do I prevent this extra space? It disappears when I omit the && echo test part, but I need to use && for other reasons.

Solution 1

set foo=hello&& echo test

works fine over here,

echo "%foo%"

prints

"hello"

:)

Solution 2

You can do this

set "foo=hello" && echo test

Solution 3

As indicated by the other answers, spaces at the end of a set command are significant, so if you type

set foo=hello & echo test

set foo=hello␣

(where ␣ represents a space), %foo% gets set to the six-character string h, e, l, l, o, .

I had a similar problem with space when echoing a string to an output file. Not surprisingly (in light of the above),

echo hello >myfile

writes the six-character string h, e, l, l, o, (plus CR and LF) to the file, while

echo hello> myfile

does not include the space. But spaces at the end of the command line are still a problem. If, for some reason, you say

echo hello>myfile␣

Weird, but this worked for me.

Solution 4

set "foo=hello"

This helped me heaps in this line

FOR /f "tokens=2 delims=><" %%a IN ('TYPE %GCV_CONFIG_FILE% ^| FIND "<%GCV_VALUE_NAME%>"') DO SET "%GCV_VARIABLE_NAME%=%%a" && echo %GCV_VARIABLE_NAME%=%%a >> %SessionLOG%

Took me a while to figure out how to remove space the end of the variable. Hope this helps someone

View more solutions

Comments

[BruceBerry]

accepted, but now I'm curious how you would set a value ending with &&. Escaping with ^ doesn't seem to work.

[UNK]

I can't figure it out either! Escaping just makes the && carry on to when you USE the variable, but putting ""s around them makes it accept the string fine - pity it then has ""s around it.

[user1686]

And that is why people hate cmd.exe

[UNK]

I dunno, with cygwin and a bit - a lot - of scripting in python and c it's pretty workable. Rather have a windows-y bash, but what are you gonna do.

[Joey]

@wcoenen: Just use set "foo=hello&&" in that case. Quoting helps sometimes, you know :-). Of course, when using the variable you still need to be careful to not let the &` through unquoted. If you know how many parsing passes run over your variables you can also embed the escape characters directly.

[dgo]

This is the answer. With delayedexpansion you can even do:set "foo=hello" && echo !foo! and it will return hello. This was helpful. Thanks

[jvverde]

Yes, this should be the right answer

[Vomit IT - Chunky Mess Style]

Is this intended to be a comment or an answer?

[waterjuice]

This is the answer I was hoping for. The currently accepted answer while works makes for much less readable .bat files