Parenthesis in variables inside IF blocks

Question

In one of my scripts, I need to use variables that contain parenthesis inside IF statements, but either the string is missing a closing parenthesis or the script ex

Answer 1

The ) from the resolved variable in your echo statement is prematurely closing the IF block.

Ordinarily, you could fix that by escaping the ) with ^), but you can't modify the environment variable to resolve to C:\Program Files (x86^).

You can prevent this issue by surrounding the variable with quotes.

As a simpler example:

> SET bad=a)b
> IF 1 == 1 ( ECHO %bad% )
b was unexpected at this time.
> IF 1 == 1 ( ECHO "%bad%" )
"a)b"