Archived News from Rob van der Woude's Scripting Pages, 2017 Q3

• WMIGen has been updated once more:

Generated code for Batch, JScript, Lua, PHP, Python, Ruby, VB .NET are now all "chain capable", i.e. if the /CHAIN command line switch is used, the generated code for these languages will show arrays of numbers both as an array and as an "interpreted" string
Some errors in the "Run" window's display of arrays were corrected (array prefixes, suffixes and separators)

Note that the generated batch code grows exponentially when using the /CHAIN switch, and it will execute a lot slower than the "plain" code.
Also keep in mind that the "chained" batch code uses some true "magic" (a.k.a. "undocumented or unsupported code tricks") to perform the character array to string conversion, which might break with future Windows updates.

• And yet another update to WMIGen: generated Tcl code is now also "chain capable", i.e. if the /CHAIN command line switch is used, the generated Tcl code will show arrays of numbers both as an array and as an "interpreted" string.

• ListPrinters.tcl has been updated: I added some error handling and it can now also be used to query remote computers.

• WMIGen 10.0.4 has been released: the generated Tcl code now accepts a remote computer as an optional command line argument, and some error handling has been added to the generated Tcl code.

• ListPrinters.tcl is a new Tcl script that will list all printers on the local computer.

• With a little help from WMIGen 10.0.3 and a lot of help from the online Tcl documentation I wrote IsCDWriter.tcl.
It is more or less equivalent with the PowerShell version.

• WMIGen 10.0.3 has been released.
Tcl has been added to the list of supported languages, and an error in the "Run" output screens has been corrected.

• WMIGen 10.0.2 has been released.
This new version can generate scripts for WMI queries in PHP, besides the list of languages it already supported.

• After writing the batch and VBScript code, yesterday, I just couldn't resist writing a PowerShell version too: IsCDWriter.ps1.
Unlike the VBScript version, which accepts any number of drive letters plus an optional remote computer name, the PowerShell script accepts either a single drive letter or no command line argument at all.

• I added a (batch) command to check whether a drive is a CD/DVD writer or not to the list of Short Command Line Tips.

• After writing the batch code, I had to write a VBScript version too, of course: IsCDWriter.vbs.

• CheckBOM.vbs is a new script to detect a file's text encoding by checking its Byte Order Mark (BOM).
I also added it to a new page on file encoding detection in the VBScript Techniques section.
Don't expect the script to tell you that a file is ANSI (ASCII) encoded, as ANSI does not use a Byte Order Mark!
Plain ANSI text will be listed as "Unknown", as will binary files.

• I added a page on file encoding detection in the Batch Techniques section.
This brilliantly simple technique by jaclaz is based on the fact that a FOR /F loop will abort if the text file contains ASCII 0 characters:

FOR /F %%A IN (%1) DO (ECHO ANSI&GOTO:EOF)

ECHO Unicode

Thanks jaclaz

• I added a paragraph on using WMI in PHP.
The next version of WMIGen will be able to generate PHP code for WMI queries.

• I added a page on wildcards in batch commands, and how they may get you into trouble.

• If Amazon's Kindle Reader for PC is allowed to automatically update, it may install updates in the user profile, instead of the Program Files directory.
To me, this is an absolute no-no!
So I disabled its auto update feature and scheduled CheckKindleUpdate.vbs to notify me if an update is available.

News Archives 2017 Q3