We get this question all the time from third party developers who work with us. It's a must implement in any stable batch file. The problem: We want to loop through a file where either the name or path has a space in it. Why is this a problem? Ok, consider the following lines of code:


@echo off
for /f "tokens=1-3* delims=," %%a in (%1) do (
echo Column 1: %%a, Column 2: %%b >> output.csv
)


If you save this snippet as "test.bat" and launch a command prompt, navigate to where the batch file is located and type in test.bat test.csv, all will work fine and an "output.csv" file will be created.

Generally in production environments though, we don't want end users to have to open up command prompts and type in test.bat "c:\documents and settings\user\My Documents\My CSV File.csv". Usually, we just ask them to drag the source file onto the batch file.

If we do that with the above script, what will happen? Well, it's a bit of a lottery! If the file that you are dragging is located in c:\myfiles\mycsv.csv then you'll probably be alright but if it's located in c:\documents and settings\user\desktop\my csv.csv, the script is unlikely to work as expected.

Still though, why don't I just enclose the %1 in quotes, that's how I would deal with the problem if a path I was typing on the command line contained some space characters. Ok, so now your code looks like this:


@echo off
for /f "tokens=1-3* delims=," %%a in ("%1") do (
echo Column 1: %%a, Column 2: %%b >> output.csv
)


Well, now it's going to interpret your input file as a literal string so instead of parsing your input file, it will actually attempt to tokenize the path and the name of your file.

The solution: The solution is to call a type command in the in part of your for loop for example, for /f "tokens1-3* delims=," %%a in ('type %1') do (... This will work make your script work as expected. So your code should look like the following:


@echo off
for /f "tokens=1-3* delims=," %%a in ('type %1') do (
echo Column 1: %%a, Column 2: %%b >> output.csv
)


That's it, your batch files will now be able to handle drag and drops flawlessly even when the path to the file in question contains spaces.

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