Embedding Double Quotes in the Command

The Windows Script Host (WSH) runtime engine reads a script's command-line arguments and makes them accessible in the WshArguments object and its associated collections. The command-line parser uses the double quote (") character as an argument delimiter; that is, an argument can contain spaces if it's enclosed in double quotes. This presents a problem, however, if the argument itself needs to contain double quotes, because the parser doesn't have a built-in way of embedding the " character. For example, suppose you want to execute the following RunProgram.vbs command line:

RunProgram.vbs  "C:Program FilesTest ProgramTest.exe  C:Program FilesTest.txt"

Windows Management Instrumentation's (WMI's) Win32_Process Create method might successfully execute the program (C:Program FilesTest ProgramTest.exe), but the parameter (C:Program FilesTest.txt) contains spaces and should be quoted so that Test.exe recognizes it as a single parameter. RunProgram.vbs uses VBScript's Unescape function to work around this problem. It takes a string that contains %xx character sequences (where xx is the hex value of an ASCII character) and replaces them with their ASCII character equivalents. The double quote is ASCII character 34 (hex 22), so you'd type the following command instead:

RunProgram.vbs "%22C:Program FilesTest ProgramTest.exe%22  %22C:Program FilesTest.txt%22"

This approach won't work if the command line you want to use actually contains %xx character sequences, but such sequences should be sufficiently rare that the suggested technique should work in most cases.