I have a script I just wrote which function serves as a message encoder/decoder. Simplified steps include: 1) It asks the user for input. 2) Each key stroke is given it's own variable name/number (ie, char1ac, char2ac ...etc). 3) Each keystroke is re-assigned a new value but keeping the same variable name. 4) The messages is re-built and displayed using the echo command | and piped into a .txt file for future use. My problem is step 4. Since the user input could be 3 keystrokes or 30, there is no set number of variables created (char1ac) so I can't just create a line that says: echo %char1ac% %char2ac% ...etc so I want a line that will echo all the variables on one line but using a wildcard (or something similar). What I have now is just a loop that will echo each keystroke, but this will appear on a different line. The goal is to keep the original keystroke number intact... and the script does not create empty variables. How can I do this?

dleite, what if you let it loop as it is until it encounters a carriage return (you can tell the user to hit 'return' when finished)? HTH. Ed in Texas.

I need the output on one line after the batch has processed the message... One way I can get around is >> the message to a .doc and then in Word manually remove the paragraph breaks... but this is an extra step.

This should really be posted in the Programming Forum (on the right) where you will get much more expert help! Home Page http://ewen.uuuq.com/

If you at least have a a counter to know how many variables you have you could do something like this: for /l %%z in (1 1 %count%) do set /p = !char%%zac!<nul You would also need to use "setlocal enabledelayedexpansion". Their is one problem with using set /p this way, it won't take "=" as the first character, that's why I used the space as the first character(which will leave you with a leading space). Batch Variable how to