return a wide string from Win32::API call

Question

I'm trying to figure out how to read the result of GetCommandLineW in Perl.

I know that is should return a string beginning with " when invoked under PowerShell, but I can't seem to extract more than one character.

The following snippet loads the GetCommandLineW function and attempts to invoke it.✱

#! /usr/bin/env perl

use strict;
use warnings;

use Win32;
use Data::Dumper;
use Win32::API;

my $GetCommandLineW = Win32::API::More->new(
  "kernel32", "LPWSTR GetCommandLineW()"
);
die unless $GetCommandLineW;

print Dumper($GetCommandLineW->Call());

prints

$VAR1 = '"';

I get the same thing if I replace LPWSTR in the command line with char * or anything else that's stringlike. I get back a pointer as a decimal number if I use int or a garbage value as the return type.

Is there a way that I can indicate to the Win32::API module that I am intending to read back a UTF-16 LE string or a way to "convince" it to put all the contents of said string into a Perl scalar.

I'm okay if there some encoding issues in the resulting scalar that need cleaning up immediately after calling $GetCommandLineW->Call() as long as all the data is there.

✱ The shebang is there so the same script can be invoked with or without Cygwin.

return a wide string from Win32::API call

0 Answers0