2 batch string questions

Question

1) Is there any built-in which can tell me if a variable's contents contain only uppercase letters?

2) is there any way to see if a variable contains a string? For example, I'd like to see if the variable %PATH% contains Ruby.

Answer 1

For part 1, findstr is the answer. You can just use the regex feature along with errorlevel:

> set xxokay=ABC
> set xxbad=AB1C
> echo %xxokay%|findstr /r "^[A-Z]*$" >nul:
> echo %errorlevel%
0
> echo %xxbad%|findstr /r "^[A-Z]*$" >nul:
> echo %errorlevel%
1

It's important in this case that you do not have a space between the echo %xxokay% and the pipe character |, since that will result in a space being output which is not one of your acceptable characters.

---

For part 2, findstr is also the answer (/i is ignore case which may be what you want - leave it off if case must match):

> set xxruby=somewhere;c:\ruby;somewhere_else
> set xxnoruby=somewhere;somewhere_else
> echo %xxruby%|findstr /i ruby >nul:
> echo %errorlevel%
0
> echo %xxnoruby%|findstr /i ruby >nul:
> echo %errorlevel%
1

You can then use:

if %errorlevel%==1 goto :label

to change the behaviour of your script in both cases.

For example, the code segment for the ruby check could be something like:

:ruby_check
    echo %yourvar%|findstr /i ruby >nul:
    if %errorlevel%==1 goto :ruby_check_not_found
:ruby_check_found
    :: ruby was found
    goto :ruby_check_end
:ruby_check_not_found:
    :: ruby was NOT found
:ruby_check_end