C++ system() not working when there are spaces in two different parameters

Solution 1:

system() runs command as cmd /C command. And here's citation from cmd doc:

If /C or /K is specified, then the remainder of the command line after
the switch is processed as a command line, where the following logic is
used to process quote (") characters:

    1.  If all of the following conditions are met, then quote characters
        on the command line are preserved:

        - no /S switch
        - exactly two quote characters
        - no special characters between the two quote characters,
          where special is one of: &<>()@^|
        - there are one or more whitespace characters between the
          two quote characters
        - the string between the two quote characters is the name
          of an executable file.

    2.  Otherwise, old behavior is to see if the first character is
        a quote character and if so, strip the leading character and
        remove the last quote character on the command line, preserving
        any text after the last quote character.

It seems that you are hitting case 2, and cmd thinks that the whole string C:\Users\Adam\Desktop\pdftotext" -layout "C:\Users\Adam\Desktop\week 4.pdf (i.e. without the first and the last quote) is the name of executable.

So the solution would be to wrap the whole command in extra quotes:

//system("\"D:\\test\" nospaces \"text with spaces\"");//gives same error as you're getting
system("\"\"D:\\test\" nospaces \"text with spaces\"\""); //ok, works

And this is very weird. I think it's also a good idea to add /S just to make sure it will always parse the string by the case 2:

system("cmd /S /C \"\"D:\\test\" nospaces \"text with spaces\"\""); //also works

Solution 2:

I got here looking for an answer, and this is the code that I came up with (and I was this explicit for the benefit of next person maintaining my code):

std::stringstream ss;
std::string pathOfCommand;
std::string pathOfInputFile;

// some code to set values for paths

ss << "\"";                             // command opening quote
ss << "\"" << pathOfCommand   << "\" "; // Quoted binary (could have spaces)
ss << "\"" << pathOfInputFile << "\"";  // Quoted input (could have spaces)
ss << "\"";                             // command closing quote
system( ss.str().c_str() );             // Execute the command

and it solved all of my problems.