How can I load the contents of a text file into a batch file variable?

Question

I need to be able to load the entire contents of a text file and load it into a variable for further processing.

How can I do that?

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Answer 1

Use for, something along the lines of:

set content=
for /f "delims=" %%i in ('filename') do set content=%content% %%i

Maybe you’ll have to do setlocal enabledelayedexpansion and/or use !content! rather than %content%. I can’t test, as I don’t have any MS Windows nearby (and I wish you the same :-).

The best batch-file-black-magic-reference I know of is at http://www.rsdn.ru/article/winshell/batanyca.xml. If you don’t know Russian, you still could make some use of the code snippets provided.