Reading a path from a file

Why when I read a path file from a .txt file does read in string appear
‘correctly’ in the debug/output screen as:

C:/pathname

However, when I check what the string ‘actually’ is in debug mode it is
Actually:

Field String:Readinpath$ = “~qC:/pathname~q”

There seems to be a problem opening the path with the ‘~qC’ pre-cursing and ending the pathname. I know I could read the string into an array and strip
Off the leading and trailing 3 chars – but I’d like to know where the ‘~q’ is coming from. Is ~q related to CHR$ for speech marks ?

Cheers…

~q is the escape sequence for the quotation mark. Windows puts them usually around a path when it passes it as an agrument to the application. btw: you can use

path = path[1..path.Length - 1]

to strip off the first and last character from the path.
-- Byteemoz

[a http://www.blitzwiki.org/index.php/Differences_Between_Blitz3D_and_BlitzMAX_:_Functional#Print]http://www.blitzwiki.org/index.php/Differences_Between_Blitz3D_and_BlitzMAX_:_Functional#Print[/a]

This is just the debugger output finding '"' (Chr$(34)) and displaying it's escaped equivalent (~q). There is only one character there, not three.

Run this...

a$ = "hello"
b$ = "~qhello~q"
c$ = Chr$(34) + "hello" + Chr$(34)

Print a$
Print b$
Print c$

DebugStop

...and have a look at the debug panel.


Also, it'd probably be safer to use...

path$ = path$.Replace(~q, "")

...in case there aren't any quotes (windows only adds quotes if there are spaces in the path, for instance).

Thanks yan and ByteMoz... Yan your idea worked well. Cheers..