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Question: Given a file name and an arbitrary list of strings, is there a canonical way to create a single command line such that Environment.GetCommandLineArgs (and C#'s void main(String[] args)/ VB's Sub Main(args() As String)) will return the same list of strings?
Background: The way .NET splits a command line into arguments is surprisingly complex, e.g.:
If a double quotation mark follows two or an even number of backslashes, each proceeding backslash pair is replaced with one backslash and the double quotation mark is removed. If a double quotation mark follows an odd number of backslashes, including just one, each preceding pair is replaced with one backslash and the remaining backslash is removed; however, in this case the double quotation mark is not removed.
Many try the simple "put every argument in double quotes and escape existing double quotes" approach and fail as soon as one of the arguments contains a trailing backslash. There have been various questions on StackOverflow regarding this issue, e.g.:
However, their answers are either not general enough to provide a canonical solution for all cases or appear to be developed "iteratively" ("Oh, there's one more special case I forgot, let's add it and now it should cover most cases..."). Since this is quite a common problem, I'd like to see a solution that provides confidence, for example, by either
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Each argument on the command line is separated by one or more spaces, and the operating system places each argument directly into its own null-terminated string. The second parameter passed to main() is an array of pointers to the character strings containing each argument (char *argv[]).
Only string values can be passed as command line arguments. All the command line arguments are stored in a character pointer array called argv[ ]. Total count of command line arguments including file path argument is stored in a integer parameter called argc.
This algorithm is generic and comes from a relatively authoritative source (MSDN blogs).
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A few years ago, Microsoft announced that they were going to release a command line parser on CodePlex (instead of the System.Shell.CommandLine that was supposed to ship with .NET Framework 4). I'm not sure if they actually did this. If you want a parser developed by a Microsoft employee have a look at cmdline. Also you can look for command line parses in CodePlex.
You could also try Mono.Options which is quite powerful.
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