Question

I want to pass a string to main, but I am having trouble with spaces.

I pass the string "C:\Documents and Settings\desktop\..." to the Main(string[] args) and I had:

args[0] = "C:\Documents" 
args[1] = "and"
args[2] = "Settings\desktop\..."

But what I want is:

args[0] = "C:\Documents and Settings\desktop\..."

Any way to keep spaces but concatenate to one element of the string? The code should also work with any number of spaces in a given file path, not just 2 in this case.

Answer 1

This is typically handled by passing the arguments in quotes.

For example, if you call this as:

yourApp.exe "C:\Documents and Settings\desktop..." 

You’ll get the string in the first arg (args[0]).

For example, using this program:

using System;

internal class Program
{
    private static void Main(string[] args)
    {
        foreach (var arg in args) Console.WriteLine(arg);

        Console.ReadKey();
    }
}

If you run this with the command line argument as:

"C:\Documents and Settings\desktop..."

(With the quotation marks in place), this will print:

C:\Documents and Settings\desktop…

If that isn’t an option, and you only have a single argument, you could always join the results:

using System;

internal class Program
{
    private static void Main(string[] args)
    {
        string argument = String.Join(" ", args);

        Console.WriteLine(argument);
        Console.ReadKey();
    }
}

This will work without wrapping the path in quotes, but it assumes the entire path is a single path, only has one space in between “words”, and has no other arguments in place. Personally, I would recommend wrapping the call in quotation marks, as it’s a standard convention.