Run truncates two or more spaces to one space

László Botka

This command doesn’t works well in Run menu

        <Command name="edit &quot;V:\J\Windows  11&quot; file " Ctrl="yes" Alt="no" Shift="no" Key="0">$(NPP_DIRECTORY)\notepad++.exe "V:\J\Windows  11"</Command>

Notepad++ doesn’t open “V:\J\Windows 11” (two spaces) but “V:\J\Windows 11” (one space), and opens/creates it with one space, if I allow.

How can I encode these two spaces so that they work properly?

PeterJones

@László-Botka said in Run truncates two or more spaces to one space:

Notepad++ doesn’t open “V:\J\Windows 11” (two spaces) but “V:\J\Windows 11” (one space), and opens/creates it with one space, if I allow.

This is a feature of XML (and HTML): text collapses whitespace, so one or more space, tab, or newline characters all collapse into one space character. This is caused by the storage format, not Notepad++ itself.

How can I encode these two spaces so that they work properly?

XML uses entities to encode characters. The XML library used by Notepad++ to read shortcuts.xml allows using the five named XML enties, & < > ' ", along with the two-digit hex entites, like  and 
 for CR and LF, or   for the space character (ASCII 32 is hex 20). Thus, when I have the command,

<Command name="edit &quot;V:\J\Windows  11&quot; file " Ctrl="yes" Alt="no" Shift="no" Key="0">cmd /k echo $(NPP_DIRECTORY)\notepad++.exe "V:\J\Windows&#x20;&#x20;11"</Command>

it properly echos two spaces rather than one. So I assume if you remove the cmd /k echo prefix, then it will properly run Notepad++

Two things as an aside.

$(NPP_FULL_FILE_PATH) is equivalent to $(NPP_DIRECTORY)\notepad++.exe … no reason to build the latter yourself.
Since $(NPP_FULL_FILE_PATH) (or $(NPP_DIRECTORY)\notepad++.exe) often have spaces in the name, it’s best to put quotes around them, so that Windows makes sure to treat them as a single entity.

Thus, best practice for your command would be,

<Command name="edit &quot;V:\J\Windows  11&quot; file " Ctrl="yes" Alt="no" Shift="no" Key="0">"$(NPP_FULL_FILE_PATH)" "V:\J\Windows&#x20;&#x20;11"</Command>

So if you change your shortcuts.xml to use that, save, and exit/restart Notepad++, that Run entry should work as you expect.

László Botka

Thank you, your help was very useful and effective.