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?

---

Here\'s what I di

Answer 1

Create a file called "SetFile.bat" that contains the following line with no carriage return at the end of it...

set FileContents=

Then in your batch file do something like this...

   @echo off
   copy SetFile.bat + %1 $tmp$.bat > nul
   call $tmp$.bat
   del $tmp$.bat

%1 is the name of your input file and %FileContents% will contain the contents of the input file after the call. This will only work on a one line file though (i.e. a file containing no carriage returns). You could strip out/replace carriage returns from the file before calling the %tmp%.bat if needed.