One of the early bugs found in Exchange Analyzer was an error being thrown when the final HTML report was displayed. I had been developing the script in a folder path of X:\Scripts\ExchangeAnalyzer. In other words, a path with no spaces. Some of the early users then tried to run the script from a path such as X:\Scripts\Exchange Analyzer and reported errors.
Here’s an example of what went wrong. Let’s say we’ve got an HTML file in C:\Scripts, and it’s called “Test Document.html”. If I use Invoke-Expression to launch that HTML file, an error will be thrown:
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PS C:\Scripts> Invoke-Expression '.\Test Document.html' .\Test : The term '.\Test' is not recognized as the name of a cmdlet, function, script file, or operable program. Check the spelling of the name, or if a path was included, verify that the path is correct and try again. |
As it turns out, Invoke-Expression doesn’t handle spaces in paths like that. But there’s a couple of easy fixes that you can use.
One fix is to use the following command instead:
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PS C:\Scripts> Invoke-Expression "& '.\Test Document.html'" |
That will also work if the path to the document is stored in a variable.
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PS C:\Scripts> $document = "C:\Scripts\Test Document.html" PS C:\Scripts> Invoke-Expression "& '$document'" |
The other option is to escape the spaces in the path, for example:
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PS C:\Scripts> $document = "C:\Scripts\Test Document.html" PS C:\Scripts> $document = $document -replace ' ','` ' PS C:\Scripts> Invoke-Expression $document |
The first option is probably better, as it doesn’t require you to modify the existing variable or set a new variable for the path with escaped spaces. But either option should solve the problem of using Invoke-Expression with spaces in the path.
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