Thread: The case of the disappearing double quotes

I have encountered a weird phenomenon. I have compiled a front-end program which lets the user select a retrogame emulator (from a list of 13), view its instructions, select from a displayed list of relevant games, and then run the selected game (using the Runtime Process). This is done by saving and running a batfile containing the appropriate command line. About half of these emulators require the game pathway to be placed between double quotes, so my commandline often takes the form-<path> + emulator.exe + space + "\"" +<path> + selected game + "\""
My problem is that the final "\"" refuses to appear in the batfile. I have tried using \0022, (char)34, String.valueOf, Character.toString, and even a 'public static string PutIntoQuotes(string value)' function but I always end up with unclosed quotes which prevents these emulators from loading the game. (I have also used trim() on the selectedgame to make sure there are no trailing spaces.) If I load the batfile and insert the missing quotes it works OK. All very frustrating when the application runs perfectly otherwise. I have the identical program running without hitch in Lazarus Free Pascal. At the moment this a Windows 7 problem. I am now about to run the application in Linux Mint. Has anyone else encountered this weird missing character?

Thanks for the suggestion that I should write a simple program to illustrate the problem. In so doing I have finally discovered the source of the problem (though not the final solution as yet). In the original program I load my lists of games from a text file into a list box for selection. I have to do this at run time since I have several emulators to cover. In my simple program I populated a list box with a few file-names manually at the start and, lo and behold the problem failed to appear. Something is happening when my filename strings are read into the list box which makes them reject the addition of a final double quotes character at the end of the command line. eg. my simple program gave me a batch file with -c:\GameBoy\VisualBoyAdvance.exe "c:\GameBoy\Files\MonsterHouse (U).zip" (which runs perfectly) whereas my full program gives a similar batch file with the same line minus the final quotes (which won't run). I shall explore other ways of setting up menus of game files. (By the way I have the same problem in Linux where I've got my program running) Thanks for your help.

Problem finally solved! It seems that the text files from which I populated my list box were infected by invisible control characters (other than leading and trailing spaces which I had controlled for) which contaminated the strings from which I built the command line. Java appears to be sensitive to this kind of thing since I had used these text files previously with a Pascal (Delphi) version of the program. I created the text files anew and the problem vanished.
By the way any members who run Emulator games are welcome to a copy of my program.