How to find operators like equal, less than and greater than?

Question

When I try to find the below line in a txt file, the error is shown

FINDSTR: Cannot open value="e app46707.xml

How to escape the equal (=) sign in a file?

FINDSTR "id type=\^"eLocator\^" value=\^"e" app46707.txt

app46707.txt

<idGroup>
<id type="unit" value="APP46707"/>
<id type="eLocator" value="e46707"/>
</idGroup>

Did you try escaping the doublequotes in your match string with just the backslash, instead of a backslash followed by a caret? — Compo, Sep 28 '18 at 12:57
Why not use a scripting language that has a native method to read and write XML files. — Squashman, Sep 28 '18 at 13:04
@Karthick use powershell. It's built-in and has native methods to operate on xml files — phuclv, Dec 15 '19 at 13:41

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Dec 15 '19 at 15:24

Inside quoted strings ^ doesn't work as the escape character¹. Therefore you don't need to escape twice with \^, only \ is enough (in this case). When you run your command then 2 arguments will be passed to FINDSTR: id type=\^eLocator" and value="e app46707.txt

That's why you see the

FINDSTR: Cannot open value="e app46707.txt

error, as there's no file named value="e app46707.txt. Besides FINDSTR searches for multiple words by default. FINDSTR "abc xyz" will find any lines that contain "abc" or "xyz". To find a literal string with spaces you must use the /C: option. After fixing all of the above points then the command will work as expected

D:\>FINDSTR /c:"id type=\"eLocator\" value=\"e" app46707.txt
<id type="eLocator" value="e46707"/>

But that way it's highly fragile, because it'll break when more spaces or tabs are inserted in the xml tag, or " is changed to ', or the tag is broken into multiple lines. Moreover escaping in cmd is a mess that's difficult to fix. PowerShell has far more regular quoting rules, and it supports everything that's available in .NET framework, so it already has native capability to parse xml files. Just use Select-Xml which will return the node based on an XPath query

PS D:\> Select-Xml -Path .\app46707.txt -XPath '//id[@type="eLocator"]'

Node Path            Pattern
---- ----            -------
id   D:\app46707.txt //id[@type="eLocator"]

¹From How does the Windows Command Interpreter (CMD.EXE) parse scripts?

If it is a quote (") toggle the quote flag, if the quote flag is active, the following special characters are no longer special: ^ & | < > ( ).

score -1 · Answer 2 · answered Sep 28 '18 at 12:33

-1

Try this:

findstr /s /i /n /p /c:"=" *app46707.txt*

answered Sep 28 '18 at 12:33

Rupesh Singra

71
10

you're finding all lines with `=` instead of lines with the type attribute – phuclv Dec 15 '19 at 15:26

How to find operators like equal, less than and greater than?

2 Answers2