[wix-users] Meaning of ^ symbol in Wix Custom Action Value attribute

[Edwin Castro]

I use ^ as the escape character in CMD. For example, when I am working with
subversion and I am inside a working copy I could use ^ like so
^/branches/my_branch but in CMD that looks like /branches/my_branch which
is not found on my local drive. I have to escape ^ like so
^^/branches/my_branch for it to work. I expect you can escape the end of
line with ^ to continue a long command on the next line just like you use \
in bash but I've never tried it before.

My bet was going to be that it was being used as a delimiter since escaping
a new line really is helpful to humans writing scripts. CMD has a command
line length limit and I don't expect you can make it longer by escaping
anything. I expect the ^ would actually do nothing unless the first
characters in the values to those properties where considered special by
CMD, for example a new line or ^.

We really are guessing here because we don't know anything about how the
resulting property is used. The only sure thing we can say is what
Christopher said, "^ has no meaning in MSI." Anything else is just a guess.

--
Edwin G. Castro



On Tue, May 15, 2018, 06:58 Russell Haley via wix-users <
wix-users at lists.wixtoolset.org> wrote:

> In CMD shell ^ is a ‎multiline delimiter. That would make sense in a
> custom action. It will replace newlines with spaces so perhaps would
> guarantee proper spacing between parameters?
>
> Hope that helps,
> Russ
>
> Sent from my BlackBerry 10 smartphone on the Virgin Mobile network.
>   Original Message
> From: Christopher Painter via wix-users
> Sent: Tuesday, May 15, 2018 5:15 AM
> To: WiX Toolset Users Mailing List
> Reply To: WiX Toolset Users Mailing List
> Cc: Christopher Painter
> Subject: Re: [wix-users] Meaning of ^ symbol in Wix Custom Action Value
> attribute
>
> ^ has no meaning in MSI. I suspect they were using it as a delimiter.
>
>
> ________________________________
> From: wix-users <wix-users-bounces at lists.wixtoolset.org> on behalf of Ven
> H via wix-users <wix-users at lists.wixtoolset.org>
> Sent: Tuesday, May 15, 2018 7:02 AM
> To: WiX Toolset Users Mailing List
> Cc: Ven H
> Subject: [wix-users] Meaning of ^ symbol in Wix Custom Action Value
> attribute
>
> I saw a CustomAction element which had a symbol ^ in its Value attribute,
> like below.
>
> <CustomAction Id="CustAxn1" Property="[MY_PROPERTY]" HideTarget="no"
> Value="[%ComputerName]^[PROPERTY1]^[ PROPERTY2 ]" />
>
> Can anyone please explain what is the significance of the symbol ^ ?
>
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