My first post, most questions already solved using this friendly provided knowldge here. But now I run out of ideas, again with a question about handling of poison characters in cmd.exe.
Let's assume there is a given string variable enclosed in double quotes. Most poison characters has already been replaced by common chars before, the left ones disturbing the script are "&", "(", ")" and "%". The string must be echoed to a file without quotes afterwards. So I had the idea to escape the poison characters tripled:
@echo off & setlocal ENABLEEXTENSIONS
SET AlbumArtist=%1
CALL :EscapePoisonChars %AlbumArtist% AlbumArtist_VDN
SET "FlacHyperLink==hyperlink^("file://%AlbumArtist_VDN%"^;"LossLess"^)")
echo %FlacHyperLink%
echo %AlbumArtist_VDN%
endlocal &GOTO:EOF
:EscapePoisonChars
@echo off & setlocal ENABLEEXTENSIONS
SET TmpString=%1
SET TmpString=%TmpString:&=^^^&%
SET TmpString=%TmpString:(=^^^(%
SET TmpString=%TmpString:)=^^^)%
endlocal&SET %2=%TmpString:~1,-1%&GOTO :EOF
When I call my script above I get the expected output - apart from the missing percent sign:
G:\YAET\20130204_Work>TryAmper.bat "100% Rock & Roll (7' UpMix)"
=hyperlink("file://100 Rock & Roll (7' UpMix)";"LossLess")
100 Rock & Roll (7' UpMix)
G:\YAET\20130204_Work>
I know that the percent can be escaped by itself. So "%%" will normally lead to a single literal "%". But it was not possible for me to find a working replace procedure for percent signs because cmd always interprets it as a variable and tries to expand it. Is this the complete wrong direction to handle this issue or just misunderstanding of variable expansion? Any hints welcome! Thanks!
Cheers, Martin
Edit Removed own code, see below Jeb's answer for clean solution.
Thanks for help, Martin