Batch highlighting issues with carets

[MagicalDrizzle]

Finding literal carets is interpreted by Notepad4 as escaping the latter quote, leading to this highlighting mistake with open quotes (the latter image is the correct highlighting)

[0hip]

https://ss64.com/nt/for_cmd.html

Escape any Special Characters in command_to_process.

If any of the strings contain characters which need to be escaped such as an Ampersand, Caret or a Pipe, (e.g. a folder path such as
"C:\Demo & Folder") then you have a couple of options:

Escape each special character with ^

FOR /f /"tokens=* delims=" %%G in ('""C:\Demo ^& Folder\demo.exe" "C:\Demo ^& Folder\data.csv""') do echo %%G

or add an escape to the outer set of quotes:

FOR /f "tokens=* delims=" %%G in ('^""C:\Demo & Folder\demo.exe" "C:\Demo & Folder\data.csv"^"') do echo %%G

If you are passing the filenames using variables, again you can Escape each special character with ^:

Set _exe="C:\Demo ^& Folder\demo.exe"
Set _datafile="C:\Demo ^& Folder\data.csv"

FOR /f "tokens=* delims=" %%G in ('"%_exe% %_datafile%"') do echo %%G

or add an escape to the outer set of quotes:

Set _exe="C:\Demo & Folder\demo.exe"
Set _datafile="C:\Demo & Folder\data.csv"

FOR /f "tokens=* delims=" %%G in ('^"%_exe% %_datafile%^"') do echo %%G