Question

I have a multiple line file (about 300 – 400 lines) each line has 72 characters and i need that transformed into a single line.

Any ideas ?

Answer 1

This is possible, assuming you want your concatenated line in one line in a text file. However, even though you can create the long line with batch, you will not be able to read the line using batch. As Electro Hacker says, you cannot create a batch environment variable longer than 8191 bytes long.

XP SET /P will preserve leading spaces from each line. But SET /P on Vista and beyond strips leading spaces.

This solution adds a space between each concatenated line.

@echo off
setlocal
set "infile=test.txt"
set "outfile=out.txt"

>"%outfile%" (
  for /f usebackq^ delims^=^ eol^= %%A in ("%infile%") do <nul set /p "=%%A "
)