Concatenation Failing

[netGong]

Hi! I'm new, as you can probably tell. Don't hold it against me.

I searched for similar problems as mine in the forum, but I didn't find anything -- I hope I'm not repeating.

At the beginning of my script, I declare several variables that will be the understood directories for certain folder and files. For some of these, though, I am trying to combine a macro with a string, which I thought would be possible. Like so:

$storage_dir = @MyDocumentsDir & "\Storage"

But when I use the concatenator & in the variable declaration, it seems to recognize only the @MyDocumentsDir section, and nothing else.

Am I doing something wrong here? What's up?

Thanks in advance for your help.

[MHz]

Welcome to the AutoIt forums,

I see nothing incorrect with your code. Perhaps your usage afterwards is the issue, but without further code shown then the issue could be almost anything.

This seems OK

$storage_dir = @MyDocumentsDir & "\Storage"
MsgBox(0, '', $storage_dir)

The messagebox shows correct for me.

[netGong]

Mhz, thanks for your help.

I have solved the problem, I'm posting it here for general knowledge and in case anyone runs into a similar issue.

I am not completely sure why this is the case, but the ShellExecute command did what the Run command did not.

It turns out the concatenation works (I sent it to a message and it came back properly), but would refuse to open up the proper directory.

After a little research and finding this, I tried switching Run out for ShellExecute, and using the concatenated directory as the file instead of the working directory. Oddly enough, this worked perfectly.

I would love if someone would be capable of explaining why these intricacies work just so, but in the meantime, the problem is solved: when working with relative or concatenated directories, use ShellExecute.

[jchd]

This is probably due to the path containing whitespace or similar thing. Shell can cope with them without problem, but DOS much less (needs quoting "like this").

[MHz]

I would love if someone would be capable of explaining why these intricacies work just so, but in the meantime, the problem is solved: when working with relative or concatenated directories, use ShellExecute.

Please refer back to my last post. Without my knowledge of how you are using the stored path then I can only make a wild guess.

The first parameter of Run, RunWait, RunAs, RunAsWait, Shellexecute and ShellexecuteWait may need to be double quoted if white space exists in the path. The previous mentioned functions may need to know where to find the file being executed and the executable may need a working directory passed to it to find dependencies.

Edited March 5, 2010 by MHz