Escaping Double Quotes in Batch Script

The escape character in batch scripts is ^. But for double-quoted strings, double up the quotes:

"string with an embedded "" character"

eplawless's own answer simply and effectively solves his specific problem: it replaces all " instances in the entire argument list with \", which is how Bash requires double-quotes inside a double-quoted string to be represented.

To generally answer the question of how to escape double-quotes inside a double-quoted string using cmd.exe, the Windows command-line interpreter (whether on the command line - often still mistakenly called the "DOS prompt" - or in a batch file):^{See bottom for a look at PowerShell.}

tl;dr:

The answer depends on which program you're calling:

• You must use "" when passing an argument to a(nother) batch file and you may use "" with applications created with Microsoft's C/C++/.NET compilers (which also accept \"), which on Windows includes Python, Node.js, and PowerShell (Core) 7+'s CLI (pwsh) but not Windows PowerShell's (powershell.exe):

  • Example: foo.bat "We had 3"" of rain."

• The following applies to targeting batch files only:

  • "" is the only way to get the command interpreter (cmd.exe) to treat the whole double-quoted string as a single argument (though that won't matter if you simply pass all arguments through to another program, with %*)

  • Sadly, however, not only are the enclosing double-quotes retained (as usual), but so are the doubled escaped ones, so obtaining the intended string is a two-step process; e.g., assuming that the double-quoted string is passed as the 1st argument, %1:

    • set "str=%~1" removes the enclosing double-quotes; set "str=%str:""="%" then converts the doubled double-quotes to single ones.
      Be sure to use the enclosing double-quotes around the assignment parts to prevent unwanted interpretation of the values.

• \" is required - as the only option - by many other programs, (e.g., Ruby, Perl, PHP, as well as programs that use the CommandLineToArgv Windows API function to parse their command-line arguments), but it use from cmd.exe is not robust and safe:

  • \" is what many executables and interpreters either require - including Windows PowerShell - when passed strings from the outside, on the command line - or, in the case of Microsoft's compilers, support as an alternative to "" - ultimately, though, it's up to the target program to parse the argument list.
    • Example: foo.exe "We had 3\" of rain."
  • However, use of \" can break calls and at least hypothetically result in unwanted, arbitrary execution of commands and/or input/output redirections:
    • The following characters present this risk: & | < >
    • For instance, the following results in unintended execution of the ver command; see further below for an explanation and the next bullet point for a workaround:
      • foo.exe "3\" of snow" "& ver."
  • For calling the Windows PowerShell CLI, powershell.exe, \"" and "^"" are robust, but limited alternatives (see section "Calling PowerShell's CLI ..." below).

• If you must use \" from cmd.exe, there are only 3 safe approaches from cmd.exe, which are, however quite cumbersome: ^{Tip of the hat to T S for his help.}

  • Using (possibly selective) delayed variable expansion in your batch file, you can store literal \" in a variable and reference that variable inside a "..." string using !var! syntax - see T S's helpful answer.

    • The above approach, despite being cumbersome, has the advantage that you can apply it methodically and that it works robustly, with any input.

  • Only with LITERAL strings - ones NOT involving VARIABLES - do you get a similarly methodical approach: categorically ^-escape all cmd.exe metacharacters: " & | < > and - if you also want to suppress variable expansion - %:
    foo.exe ^"3\^" of snow^" ^"^& ver.^"

  • Otherwise, you must formulate your string based on recognizing which portions of the string cmd.exe considers unquoted due to misinterpreting \" as closing delimiters:

    • in literal portions containing shell metacharacters: ^-escape them; using the example above, it is & that must be ^-escaped:
      foo.exe "3\" of snow" "^& ver."

    • in portions with %...%-style variable references: ensure that cmd.exe considers them part of a "..." string and that that the variable values do not themselves have embedded, unbalanced quotes - which is not even always possible.

Background

^{Note: This is based on my own experiments. Do let me know if I'm wrong.}

POSIX-like shells such as Bash on Unix-like systems tokenize the argument list (string) before passing arguments individually to the target program: among other expansions, they split the argument list into individual words (word splitting) and remove quoting characters from the resulting words (quote removal). The target program is handed an array of individual, verbatim arguments, i.e. with syntactic quotes removed.

By contrast, the Windows command interpreter apparently does not tokenize the argument list and simply passes the single string comprising all arguments - including quoting chars. - to the target program.
However, some preprocessing takes place before the single string is passed to the target program: ^ escape chars. outside of double-quoted strings are removed (they escape the following char.), and variable references (e.g., %USERNAME%) are interpolated first.

Thus, unlike in Unix, it is the target program's responsibility to parse to parse the arguments string and break it down into individual arguments with quotes removed. Thus, different programs can require differing escaping methods and there's no single escaping mechanism that is guaranteed to work with all programs - ^{https://stackoverflow.com/a/4094897/45375 contains excellent background on the anarchy that is Windows command-line parsing.}

In practice, \" is very common, but NOT SAFE from cmd.exe, as mentioned above:

Since cmd.exe itself doesn't recognize \" as an escaped double-quote, it can misconstrue later tokens on the command line as unquoted and potentially interpret them as commands and/or input/output redirections.
In a nutshell: the problem surfaces, if any of the following characters follow an opening or unbalanced \": & | < >; for example:

foo.exe "3\" of snow" "& ver."

cmd.exe sees the following tokens, resulting from misinterpreting \" as a regular double-quote:

• "3\"
• of
• snow" "
• rest: & ver.

Since cmd.exe thinks that & ver. is unquoted, it interprets it as & (the command-sequencing operator), followed by the name of a command to execute (ver. - the . is ignored; ver reports cmd.exe's version information).
The overall effect is:

• First, foo.exe is invoked with the first 3 tokens only.
• Then, command ver is executed.

Even in cases where the accidental command does no harm, your overall command won't work as designed, given that not all arguments are passed to it.

Many compilers / interpreters recognize ONLY \" - e.g., the GNU C/C++ compiler, Perl, Ruby, PHP, as well as programs that use the CommandLineToArgv Windows API function to parse their command-line arguments - and for them there is no simple solution to this problem.
Essentially, you'd have to know in advance which portions of your command line are misinterpreted as unquoted, and selectively ^-escape all instances of & | < > in those portions.

By contrast, use of "" is SAFE, but is regrettably only supported by Microsoft-compiler-based executables and batch files (in the case of batch files, with the quirks discussed above), which notable excludes PowerShell - see next section.

Calling PowerShell's CLI from cmd.exe or POSIX-like shells:

Note: See the bottom section for how quoting is handled inside PowerShell.

When invoked from the outside - e.g., from cmd.exe, whether from the command line or a batch file:

• PowerShell [Core] v6+ now properly recognizes "" (in addition to \"), which is both safe to use and whitespace-preserving.

  • pwsh -c " ""a & c"".length " doesn't break and correctly yields 6

• Windows PowerShell (the legacy edition whose latest and final version is 5.1) recognizes only \" or """, the latter being the most robust choice from cmd.exe, in the form "^""" (even though internally PowerShell uses ` as the escape character in double-quoted strings and also accepts "" - see bottom section), as discussed next:

Calling Windows PowerShell from cmd.exe / a batch file:

• "" breaks, because it is fundamentally unsupported:

  • powershell -c " ""ab c"".length " -> error "The string is missing the terminator"

• \" and """ work in principle, but aren't safe:

  • powershell -c " \"ab c\".length " works as intended: it outputs 5 (note the 2 spaces)
  • But it isn't safe, because cmd.exe metacharacters break the command, unless escaped:
    powershell -c " \"a& c\".length " breaks, due to the &, which would have to be escaped as ^&

• \"" is safe, but normalizes interior whitespace, which can be undesired:

• powershell -c " \""a& c\"".length " outputs 4(!), because the 2 spaces are normalized to 1.

• "^"" is the best choice for Windows PowerShell specifically, where it is both safe and whitespace-preserving, but with PowerShell Core (on Windows) it is the same as \"", i.e, whitespace-normalizing (as stated, simply use "" there). Credit goes to Venryx for discovering this approach.

  • powershell -c " "^""a& c"^"".length " works: doesn't break - despite & - and outputs 5, i.e., correctly preserved whitespace.

  • PowerShell Core: pwsh -c " "^""a& c"^"".length " works, but outputs 4, i.e. normalizes whitespace, as \"" does.

On Unix-like platforms (Linux, macOS), when calling PowerShell [Core]'s CLI, pwsh, from a POSIX-like shell such as bash:

You must use \", which, however is both safe and whitespace-preserving:

$ pwsh -c " \"a&  c|\".length" # OK: 5

Related information

• ^ can only be used as the escape character in unquoted strings - inside double-quoted strings, ^ is not special and treated as a literal.

  • CAVEAT: Use of ^ in parameters passed to the call statement is broken (this applies to both uses of call: invoking another batch file or binary, and calling a subroutine in the same batch file):
    • ^ instances in double-quoted values are inexplicably doubled, altering the value being passed: e.g., if variable %v% contains literal value a^b, call :foo "%v%" assigns "a^^b"(!) to %1 (the first parameter) in subroutine :foo.
    • Unquoted use of ^ with call is broken altogether in that ^ can no longer be used to escape special characters: e.g., call foo.cmd a^&b quietly breaks (instead of passing literal a&b too foo.cmd, as would be the case without call) - foo.cmd is never even invoked(!), at least on Windows 7.

• Escaping a literal % is a special case, unfortunately, which requires distinct syntax depending on whether a string is specified on the command line vs. inside a batch file; see https://stackoverflow.com/a/31420292/45375

  • The short of it: Inside a batch file, use %%. On the command line, % cannot be escaped, but if you place a ^ at the start, end, or inside a variable name in an unquoted string (e.g., echo %^foo%), you can prevent variable expansion (interpolation); % instances on the command line that are not part of a variable reference are treated as literals (e.g, 100%).

• Generally, to safely work with variable values that may contain spaces and special characters:

  • Assignment: Enclose both the variable name and the value in a single pair of double-quotes; e.g., set "v=a & b" assigns literal value a & b to variable %v% (by contrast, set v="a & b" would make the double-quotes part of the value). Escape literal % instances as %% (works only in batch files - see above).
  • Reference: Double-quote variable references to make sure their value is not interpolated; e.g., echo "%v%" does not subject the value of %v% to interpolation and prints "a & b" (but note that the double-quotes are invariably printed too). By contrast, echo %v% passes literal a to echo, interprets & as the command-sequencing operator, and therefore tries to execute a command named b.
    Also note the above caveat re use of ^ with the call statement.
    • External programs typically take care of removing enclosing double-quotes around parameters, but, as noted, in batch files you have to do it yourself (e.g., %~1 to remove enclosing double-quotes from the 1st parameter) and, sadly, there is no direct way that I know of to get echo to print a variable value faithfully without the enclosing double-quotes.
      • Neil offers a for-based workaround that works as long as the value has no embedded double quotes; e.g.:
        set "var=^&')|;,%!" for /f "delims=" %%v in ("%var%") do echo %%~v

• cmd.exe does not recognize single-quotes as string delimiters ('...') - they are treated as literals and cannot generally be used to delimit strings with embedded whitespace; also, it follows that the tokens abutting the single-quotes and any tokens in between are treated as unquoted by cmd.exe and interpreted accordingly.

  • However, given that target programs ultimately perform their own argument parsing, some programs such as Ruby do recognize single-quoted strings even on Windows; by contrast, C/C++ executables and Perl do not recognize them.
    Even if supported by the target program, however, it is not advisable to use single-quoted strings, given that their contents are not protected from potentially unwanted interpretation by cmd.exe.

Quoting from within PowerShell:

Windows PowerShell is a much more advanced shell than cmd.exe, and it has been a part of Windows for many years now (and PowerShell Core brought the PowerShell experience to macOS and Linux as well).

PowerShell works consistently internally with respect to quoting:

• inside double-quoted strings, use `" or "" to escape double-quotes
• inside single-quoted strings, use '' to escape single-quotes

This works on the PowerShell command line and when passing parameters to PowerShell scripts or functions from within PowerShell.

(As discussed above, passing an escaped double-quote to PowerShell from the outside requires \" or, more robustly, \"" - nothing else works).

Sadly, when invoking external programs from PowerShell, you're faced with the need to both accommodate PowerShell's own quoting rules and to escape for the target program:

• This problematic behavior is also discussed and summarized in this answer; the experimental PSNativeCommandArgumentPassing feature introduced in PowerShell Core 7.2.0-preview.5 - assuming it becomes an official feature - will fix this at least for those external programs that accept \".

Double-quotes inside double-quoted strings:

Consider string "3`" of rain", which PowerShell-internally translates to literal 3" of rain.

If you want to pass this string to an external program, you have to apply the target program's escaping in addition to PowerShell's; say you want to pass the string to a C program, which expects embedded double-quotes to be escaped as \":

foo.exe "3\`" of rain"

Note how both `" - to make PowerShell happy - and the \ - to make the target program happy - must be present.

The same logic applies to invoking a batch file, where "" must be used:

foo.bat "3`"`" of rain"

By contrast, embedding single-quotes in a double-quoted string requires no escaping at all.

Single-quotes inside single-quoted strings do not require extra escaping; consider '2'' of snow', which is PowerShell' representation of 2' of snow.

foo.exe '2'' of snow'
foo.bat '2'' of snow'

PowerShell translates single-quoted strings to double-quoted ones before passing them to the target program.

However, double-quotes inside single-quoted strings, which do not need escaping for PowerShell, do still need to be escaped for the target program:

foo.exe '3\" of rain'
foo.bat '3"" of rain'

PowerShell v3 introduced the magic --% option, called the stop-parsing symbol, which alleviates some of the pain, by passing anything after it uninterpreted to the target program, save for cmd.exe-style environment-variable references (e.g., %USERNAME%), which are expanded; e.g.:

foo.exe --% "3\" of rain" -u %USERNAME%

Note how escaping the embedded " as \" for the target program only (and not also for PowerShell as \`") is sufficient.

However, this approach:

• does not allow for escaping % characters in order to avoid environment-variable expansions.
• precludes direct use of PowerShell variables and expressions; instead, the command line must be built in a string variable in a first step, and then invoked with Invoke-Expression in a second.

An alternative workaround* that addresses this problem is to call via cmd /c with a single argument containing the entire command line:

cmd /c "foo.exe `"3\`" of rain`" -u $env:USERNAME"

Thus, despite its many advancements, PowerShell has not made escaping easier when calling external programs - on the contrary. It has, however, introduced support for single-quoted strings.

If you don't mind installing a third-party module (authored by me), the Native module (Install-Module Native) offers backward- and forward-compatible helper function ie, which obviates the need for the extra escaping and contains important accommodations for high-profile CLIs on Windows:

# Simply prepend 'ie' to your external-program calls.
ie foo.exe '3" of rain' -u $env:USERNAME