NullifyNetwork

Attempting to pass paths with a space or any other command line argument that requires being enclosed in quotes was causing me some mild frustration, it looks like the .NET implementation that fills args is incorrectly mangling the data that is passed into it.  A major bug that shouldn't have gotten through QA exists somewhere...

If you pass a path into a program that is foreach-ing over the args collection through the debug properties in visual studio (and presumably through anywhere else!) you go from:-

program.exe /path "c:\my documents\" /dostuff 1

Turn into two rather than four arguments:-

args[0] is /path
args[1] is c:\my documents" /dostuff 1

Which is downright strange, as you'd expect to get:-

args[0] is /path
args[1] is c:\my documents\
args[2] is /dostuff
args[3] is 1

What on earth are they doing to cause such a mess to command line arguments... Anyway, whilst I'm not sure when this started but thankfully the Environment.CommandLine is left intact and undamaged, so you can do something like this to fix the problem:-

private static string[] FixedExtractCmdLineElements()
        {
            List<string> elements = new List<string>();

            string[] firstParts = Environment.CommandLine.Split(' ');

            //reparse it
            StringBuilder temporaryPart = new StringBuilder("");
            bool inside = false;
            foreach (string part in firstParts)
            {
                //are we inside a quoted part, or did we just find a quote?
                if (!inside && !part.Contains("\""))
                {
                    elements.Add(part);
                }
                else
                {
                    if (inside)
                    {
                        //we are still inside a quote...
                        temporaryPart.Append(" " + part);

                        if (part.Contains("\""))
                        {
                            //then we are also at the end!
                            elements.Add(temporaryPart.Replace("\"", "").ToString()); //add the part minus its quotes to the array
                            //all done!
                            inside = false;
                        }
                    }
                    else
                    {
                        //else we just found a quote!
                        inside = true;
                        temporaryPart = new StringBuilder(part);
                    }
                }
            }

            return elements.ToArray();
        }