How to escape the dollar sign in pre-build step

Question

'm fighting against Visual Studio to properly escape the dollar sign ($) in a pre-build step. The goal is to provide a variable name as a litteral. VS should not try to process the variable name.

The documentation states that %xx (where xx is the hexadecimal value of the character) should be used.

I've tried the following :

%24(var.Data.WebHost.ProjectDir)

But the result is

4(var.Data.WebHost.ProjectDir)

Instead of

$(var.Data.WebHost.ProjectDir)

What am I doing wrong here ?

UPDATE 1 : the correct syntax is to put the $ sign between double quotes.

"$"(var.Data.WebHost.ProjectDir)

is the answer.

Answer 1

As an alternative using the approach in the documentation would be to do:

%2524(var.Data.WebHost.ProjectDir)

%25 does the %, while the remaining 24 will be appended, forming %24, thus translating into $(Whatever) in the output code.

The "$" approach didn't work for me as I was writing an osx-compatible post build event (for mono 5), so I needed something like this:

if [ "$(uname)" == "Darwin" ]; then (...)

And the output, ""$"(uname)" didn't work for me.

I hope this late answer is helpful to anybody in the future (as there does not seem, down to this point, to have much about this issue on google).