The curious case of the missing exclamation mark in CMD files

Question

I have whittled down a more complex CMD script to the essentials. It reads an input file line by line, unquotes it (if quoted) and writes it out to another CMD file.

Answer 1

Try this:

@echo off
if exist bang2.cmd del bang2.cmd
for /f "tokens=*" %%a in (bang1.txt) do call :doit1 %%a
exit /b

:doit1
set "P1=%1"
if %P1%.==. exit /b
call :unquotex P1 %P1%
echo>>bang2.cmd echo P1:[%P1%]
exit /b

:unquotex
set "%1=%~2"
exit /b

Using parameters, you can get the version without quotes using %~1 instead of %1. If %1 contains "hello world" for example, then %~1 contains hello world. This allows for an easier unquoting mechanism, removing the need for delayed expansion.