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Application Note 3

Files with spaces in their names are not handled correctly


If you use the 32-Bit Edition under Windows 98, Windows 95, Windows NT 4.0 or Windows 2000 you might believe that PFE can't handle files whose names contain spaces.

For example, if you double click on the filename

c:\Program Files\Widgets\My Best Ideas.txt

you might find that PFE reports that it can't find a file called C:\Program

This isn't, in fact, a bug in PFE; it's a symptom that you have a slight misconfigration in your system.

The problem is that the commonest way you'd associate a file type with PFE, so that PFE opens it when you double-click in Explorer, would be to define the command as, for example

c:\utils\pfe32

This is fine for many programs (and works perfectly for notepad). However, PFE has a different command-line syntax, and because it can accept more than one file on a command line, it treats a space as a separator between file names.

The correct way to define your associations is to have PFE do it. If you use the Options Preferences command, you'll find that there's an Associations panel in the dialog - this lets you tell PFE to set up the associations you want in the correct form.

If you do need to set them up yourself for some reason, you need to use a different command syntax: specify the command as, for example:

c:\utils\pfe32 "%1"

where the "%1" part puts the filename into the command line in a form that won't cause confusion.


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