using batch echo with special characters

Question

This maybe really easy but there were no answers for it over the net. I want to echo a XML line via batch into a file but it misunderstands the XML closing tag for redirection ">". The line is as follows:

echo <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?> > myfile.xml 

is there any way to give a hint to batch parser not to interpret a special string? I used double-quotes but it writes them to the file as well! The file should look like this after echo:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?> 

Answer 1

You can escape shell metacharacters with ^:

echo ^<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?^> > myfile.xml 

Note that since echo is a shell built-in it doesn't follow the usual conventions regarding quoting, so just quoting the argument will output the quotes instead of removing them.

Answer 2

In order to use special characters, such as '>' on Windows with echo, you need to place a special escape character before it.

For instance

echo A->B 

will not work since '>' has to be escaped by '^':

 echo A-^>B 

See also escape sequences.

There is a short batch file, which prints a basic set of special character and their escape sequences.