Question

the following msbuild Exec statement

<Exec Command="curl.exe -f -O --url &quot;$(SourceURL)&quot;">

fails if SourceURL contains spaces. Even if I try

<PropertyGroup>
    <SourceURL>http://www.example.com/url%20with%20spaces</SourceURL>
</PropertyGroup>

or even

<PropertyGroup>
    <SourceURL>http://www.example.com/url&37;20with&37;20spaces</SourceURL>
</PropertyGroup>

msbuild automagically translates any of this to spaces (can you believe that?) and curl tries to fetch http://www.example.com/url, which yields a 404 error.

I do not understand why. Did I not properly quote the URL argument?

[update] On a command prompt, the following works:

curl.exe -f -O --url "http://www.example.com/url%20with%20spaces"

while this doesn’t:

curl.exe -f -O --url "http://www.example.com/url with spaces"

So my question really boils down to: how do I prevent msbuild from replacing %20 with whitespace?

cheers
Hendrik

(Using curl 7.21.7 (i386-pc-win32) libcurl/7.21.7 OpenSSL/0.9.8r zlib/1.2.5 and msbuild 3.5.30729.1 on Windows 7)

Answer 1

The problem is:

1. Msbuild replaces %20 with whitespace
2. Even if you escape the percent sign using either %2520 or &37;20, cmd.exe will replace %2 with an empty string, such that a 0 remains on the command line.

So the solution is:

<PropertyGroup>
    <SourceURL>http://www.example.com/url%25%2520with%25%2520spaces</SourceURL>
</PropertyGroup>

Aaaargh. Anyone who doesn’t get a headache from such an elaborate escape sequence?