Escaping quotes in powershell.exe via command prompt

Question

After viewing this post I am trying to escape quotes, but doing a backslash does not escape html quotes like this: ” <-- notice it's a right double quote unlike the normal ".

E.g:

Works fine:

powershell -noexit -command $str = \"hello '123' world\"; write-host $str

Does not work:

powershell -noexit -command $str = \"hello '123'” world\"; write-host $str

How can I escape this? Or better how do I escape ALL characters at once to get rid of this hassle!

Answer 1

Use a backtick ` to escape your special double quote, so this:

powershell -noexit -command $str = \"hello '123'” world\"; write-host $str

becomes this:

powershell -noexit -command $str = \"hello '123'`” world\"; write-host $str

EDIT:

Option 1. If you prefer using here-strings, you can change the above to powershell -file and run your powershell script file. Use here-strings as much as you want there.

Option 2. If you prefer not to deal with your special quote character inside calling/processing application/script, you can switch to using single quotes instead. In this case you only need to escape your single quotes, by doubling them, like this:

powershell -noexit -command $str = 'hello ''123''” world'; write-host $str

Notice here I did not do anything to your double quote character, and it works just fine.

So your string replace code may become slightly easier to read and maintain, especially if the editor does not display this character correctly (like Powershell console does - it shows a regular double quote instead).

Answer 2

Running this from a command prompt (and within PowerShell actually):

powershell -noexit -command { $str = "hello '123' world"; write-host $str }

generates:

hello '123' world

Does this do what you need?