Error when using dos to open firefox browser

I want to open firefox browser with this code. --> dos('start http://translate.google.com/translate_tts?tl=en&q=Hello world');

but it got error like this --> 'q' is not recognized as an internal or external command, operable program or batch file.

How to solve it. Thank you everyone

Answer 1

[Brendan Hamm]

& is a special character in batch scripting. You need to pass in the URL in quotes and pass an empty quote in front of it for the title.

dos('start "" "http://translate.google.com/translate_tts?tl=en&q=Hello world"');

[Ara]

It worked but I want to know why have to put "", What is that mean? And how to do if url is in var and open it by calling from variable such as url='http://translate.google.com/translate_tts?tl=en&q=Hello world'. I got error when try dos(url); Thank you

[Brendan Hamm]

The first "" is just the title for display in the window title bar. That is the start command opens a new command window and the title of it will be whatever is in this string. However the path we specify is a url and therefore windows opens the appropriate application instead, so title is not even useful here. In the dos command window you can type:

help start

for more information on the start command. We are not interested in the tile for the window anyhow as we are opening our web browser. For your second question you would want to use:

>> url = '"http://translate.google.com/translate_tts?tl=en&q=Hello world"'
url =
"http://translate.google.com/translate_tts?tl=en&q=Hello world"

As you can see the return value includes the quotation character in the string. Now just passing url to the dos command is not enough as we are still missing pieces from my above post. Now we need to concatenate url with the rest of the input:

str = ['start "" ', url]; % Creates the literal string I pass to dos in above post
dos(str);

Hope this helps explain the why.

[Ara]

It's very helpful. Thank you for your help :)