Stopping percentage expansion in a Windows batch file
Posted by jpluimers on 2010/04/09
A while ago, I asked a question on percentage expansion in batch-files on superuser.com: a great site with great answers, similar to stackoverflow.com and serverfault.com , but now for asking “Power User” kind of questions.
The percentage sign (%) in URL‘s is to escape (or URLencode) characters that should not be in a URL itself.
(Note that the old new thing had a very interesting article on URL encoding: there are many different opinions on how to to this ‘right’, and a few of these ‘right’ opinions are not always compatible with each other).
In Windows batch-files and the command-line, the percentage sign is used to expand environment variables, arguments and for loop indexes.
To make life ‘easier’, inside a batch-file, the percentage sign has a slightly different meaning than on the command-line itself.
This can break your batch-files when you use URL encoded parameters.
It does not matter if these parameters are quoted or not: cmd.exe expands them, unless you escape them properly.
So, the command for downloading the URL with wget (similar to curl) differs from running it on the plain command-line or in a batch-file.
- URL:
http://www.justitie.nl/images/Handleiding%20voor%20verwerkers%20persoonsgegevens_tcm34-3940.pdf - Command-line:
wget “http://www.justitie.nl/images/Handleiding%20voor%20verwerkers%20persoonsgegevens_tcm34-3940.pdf” - Batch-file:
wget “http://www.justitie.nl/images/Handleiding%%20voor%%20verwerkers%%20persoonsgegevens_tcm34-3940.pdf”
Escaping percentage in batch-files
So the best way to escape percentages in batch files is to double them: each % becomes %%.
There is even a very old (MS-DOS era!) knowledge base article about this topic, that I just found when doing the research for this blog article :-)
URL decode
As a sidenote: manually decode thesed escaped URL’s is always a pain.
There are many sites that can do URL decoding on-line.
PS: This was the original question: How can I stop percentage expansion in a batch file? – Super User.
The Wiert Corner - irregular stream of stuff 
ASB said
You can also escape the % symbols with a ^% for every %
jpluimers said
Thanks, that is a magnificent trick!
–jeroen
Andreas Haist said
Oh Man… After hours of try and error you point me to the solution!!!!
Thanks :-)