Question

I need to access the commandline from within a C# application. I can’t find a way to detect mismatched double quotes if I use the “args” parameter.

The application I’m working on the moment has an option to encrypt a string that you pass to it via the commandline.

eg.

program.exe -encrypt somestring

Results in:

EZs/6rWxvJ82+VE8unJ0Xw==

Now if the user types in this:

program.exe -encrypt somestring extra characters

it ignores everything after “somestring” (you can still access the rest of the values through the “args” parameter).

You can workaround this easily using double quotes:

program.exe -encrypt "somestring extra characters"

And of course if you want to use embedded quotes you can escape them with “\”:

program.exe -encrypt "somestring \"extra\" characters"

The problem occurs when the user inputs something like this:

program.exe -encrypt "somestring extra characters

or:

program.exe -encrypt somestring ex"tra characters

The program will completely ignore the double quote, which not be what the user was expecting. I would like to detect cases like these and inform the user about the mismatched/unescaped quote, otherwise they might end up with an encrypted version of the wrong string.

Answer 1

This is how the command line passes arguments to your C# program. You cannot change that. You can however access the command arguments string as a whole and perform the validation yourself.

MSDN: Environment.CommandLine Property