A while ago, I needed to get the various date, time and week values from WMIC to environment variables with pre-padded zeros. I thought: easy job, just write a batch file.
Tough luck: I couldn’t get the values to expand properly. Which in the end was caused by WMIC emitting UTF-16 and the command-interpreter not expecting double-byte character sets which messed up my original batch file.
| What I wanted | What I got |
|---|---|
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WMIC uses this encoding because the Wide versions of Windows API calls use UTF-16 (sometimes called UCS-2 as that is where UTF-16 evolved from).
As Windows uses little-endian encoding by default, the high byte (which is zero) of a UTF-16 code point with ASCII characters comes first. That messes up the command interpreter.
Lucikly rojo was of great help solving this.
His solution is centered around set /A, which:
- handles integer numbers and calls them “numeric” (hinting floating point, but those are truncated to integer; one of the tricks rojo uses)
- and (be careful with this as 08 and 09 are not octal numbers) uses these prefixes:
- 0 for Octal
- 0x for hexadecimal
Enjoy and shiver with the online help extract:
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