How to split double quoted line into multiple lines in Windows batch file?

Question

Long commands in Windows batch files can be split to multiple lines by using the ^ as mentioned in Long commands split over multiple lines in Windows Vista batc

Answer 1

The most straight forward answer is to escape the quotes. They will be printed, but they will not functionally quote the contents as far as CMD.EXE is concerned.

@echo off
echo ^"A very long line I want to ^
split into two lines^"

Any special characters that appear in the line must also be escaped since they are no longer functionally quoted.

@echo off
echo ^"A very long line I want to ^
split into two lines ^
that also contains special characters ^^ ^& ^| ^> ^< ^"

As jeb said, the line continuation escapes the first character of the next line. So if the first character of the next line happens to be a special character, it should not be escaped a second time. The code below will give the exact same results as the previous example.

@echo off
echo ^"A very long line I want to ^
split into two lines ^
that also contains special characters ^^ ^
& ^| ^> ^< ^"