How do you strip quotes out of an ECHO'ed string in a Windows batch file?

Question

I have a Windows batch file I\'m creating, but I have to ECHO a large complex string, so I\'m having to put double quotes on either end. The problem is that the quotes are

Answer 1

Using the FOR command to strip the surrounding quotation marks is the most efficient way I've found to do this. In the compact form (Example 2) it's a one-liner.

Example 1: The 5-line (commented) solution.

REM Set your string
SET STR=" 
    (Optional) If specified this is the name of your edited file"

REM Echo your string into the FOR loop
FOR /F "usebackq tokens=*" %%A IN (`ECHO %STR%`) DO (
    REM Use the "~" syntax modifier to strip the surrounding quotation marks
    ECHO %%~A
)

Example 2: The 1-liner real-world example.

SET STR=" 
    (Optional) If specified this is the name of your edited file"

FOR /F "usebackq tokens=*" %%A IN (`ECHO %STR%`) DO @ECHO %%~A

I find it interesting that the inner echo ignores the redirection characters '<' and '>'.
If you execute ECHO asdfsd>asdfasd you will write file out instead of std out.

Hope this helps :)

Edit:

I thought about it and realized there is an even easier (and less hacky) way of accomplishing the same thing. Use the enhanced variable substitution/expansion (see HELP SET) like this:

SET STR=" 
    (Optional) If specified this is the name of your edited file"

ECHO %STR:~1,-1%

That will print all but the first and last characters (your quotation marks). I would recommend using SETLOCAL ENABLEDELAYEDEXPANSION too. If you need to figure out where quotation marks are located in the string you can use FINDSTR to get the character #s.