How can I load the contents of a text file into a batch file variable

Question

I need to be able to load the entire contents of a text file and load it into a variable for further processing     How can I do that     Here s what I did thanks to Roman Odaisky s answer   SetLocal EnableDelayedExpansion set content  for  F  delims     i in  test txt  do set content  content    i  echo  content  EndLocal

User · Accepted Answer

Use for  something along the lines of   set content  for  f  delims     i in   filename   do set content  content    i   Maybe you   ll have to do setlocal enabledelayedexpansion and or use  content  rather than  content   I can   t test  as I don   t have any MS Windows nearby  and I wish you the same  -    The best batch-file-black-magic-reference I know of is at http   www rsdn ru article winshell batanyca xml  If you don   t know Russian  you still could make some use of the code snippets provided

User · Answer

If your set command supports the  p switch  then you can pipe input that way   set  p VAR1  lt test txt set     find   P       The  P switch allows you to set the value of a variable to a line of   input entered by the user   Displays the specified promptString before   reading the line of input   The promptString can be empty    This has the added benefit of working for un-registered file types  which the accepted answer does not

User · Answer

Create a file called  SetFile bat  that contains the following line with no carriage return at the end of it     set FileContents    Then in your batch file do something like this         echo off    copy SetFile bat    1  tmp  bat  gt  nul    call  tmp  bat    del  tmp  bat    1 is the name of your input file and  FileContents  will contain the contents of the input file after the call  This will only work on a one line file though  i e  a file containing no carriage returns   You could strip out replace carriage returns from the file before calling the  tmp  bat if needed

User · Answer

You can use   set content  for  f  delims     i in   type text txt   do set content  content    i

User · Answer

Can you define further processing   You can use a for loop to almost do this  but there s no easy way to insert CR LF into an environment variable  so you ll have everything in one line   you may be able to work around this depending on what you need to do    You re also limited to less than about 8k text files this way    You can t create a single env var bigger than around 8k    Bill s suggestion of a for loop is probably what you need   You process the file one line at a time    use  i at a command line   i in a batch file   for  f  tokens 1 delims     i in  file txt  do echo   i   more advanced   for  f  tokens 1 delims     i in  file txt  do call  part2   i goto  fin   part2 echo  1   do further processing here goto  eof   fin

User · Answer

for  f  delims     i in  count txt  do set c   i echo  c  pause

[windows] How can I load the contents of a text file into a batch file variable?

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