Passing a search string to IE from the command line   

I'm really not sure what news group is most appropriate for my question so 
here goes:

Is there a way to pass a search string to IE when invoking IE from the 
command line?  (Or rather, when launching IE from within another app with, 
eg, ShellExecute())

By search string, I'm referring to the substring following the "?" in a URL. 
eg, http://www/my/web/site.htm?arg1=foo&arg2=bar.  I want to be able to pass 
arguments to an html page directly from my (C++) application.

I've tried escaping the ?, tried putting everything in quotes but IE (at 
least IE 6) seems not to interpret the "?" correctly when it comes from the 
command line.  Is there some trick to doing this?

Thanks!

date: Fri, 2 Dec 2005 09:19:02 -0800   author:   Larry

Re: Passing a search string to IE from the command line   

Larry wrote:
> I'm really not sure what news group is most appropriate for my
> question so here goes:
>
> Is there a way to pass a search string to IE when invoking IE from the
> command line?  (Or rather, when launching IE from within another app
> with, eg, ShellExecute())
>
> By search string, I'm referring to the substring following the "?" in
> a URL. eg, http://www/my/web/site.htm?arg1=foo&arg2=bar.  I want to
> be able to pass arguments to an html page directly from my (C++)
> application.
>
> I've tried escaping the ?, tried putting everything in quotes but IE
> (at least IE 6) seems not to interpret the "?" correctly when it
> comes from the command line.  Is there some trick to doing this?
>
> Thanks!
Don't escape the ?. Just pass the string as it would be entered in the
address bar.

Try this:
Start | Run
Paste http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;q305053 into
the dialog and press OK

I'm not a C++ guy, so you might get better support in a C++ newsgroup, but
try this script in a test.js file:

WshShell = WScript.CreateObject("WScript.Shell");
WshShell.Run("http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;q30505
3")
WScript.quit();



-- 
Microsoft MVP -- ASP/ASP.NET
Please reply to the newsgroup. The email account listed in my From
header is my spam trap, so I don't check it very often. You will get a
quicker response by posting to the newsgroup.

date: Fri, 2 Dec 2005 13:47:25 -0500   author:   Bob Barrows [MVP] com

Re: Passing a search string to IE from the command line   

Ah, thank you, you've led me to a solution.  My problem was that I was not 
prefixing the URL of a local file + search string with "file://"  which seems 
to be necessary for correct interpretation of the search string when passing 
the URL directly to IE, though not necessary when doing something like 
   window.location.href =... 
within javascript.

"Bob Barrows [MVP]" wrote:

> Larry wrote:
> > I'm really not sure what news group is most appropriate for my
> > question so here goes:
> >
> > Is there a way to pass a search string to IE when invoking IE from the
> > command line?  (Or rather, when launching IE from within another app
> > with, eg, ShellExecute())
> >
> > By search string, I'm referring to the substring following the "?" in
> > a URL. eg, http://www/my/web/site.htm?arg1=foo&arg2=bar.  I want to
> > be able to pass arguments to an html page directly from my (C++)
> > application.
> >
> > I've tried escaping the ?, tried putting everything in quotes but IE
> > (at least IE 6) seems not to interpret the "?" correctly when it
> > comes from the command line.  Is there some trick to doing this?
> >
> > Thanks!
> Don't escape the ?. Just pass the string as it would be entered in the
> address bar.
> 
> Try this:
> Start | Run
> Paste http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;q305053 into
> the dialog and press OK
> 
> I'm not a C++ guy, so you might get better support in a C++ newsgroup, but
> try this script in a test.js file:
> 
> WshShell = WScript.CreateObject("WScript.Shell");
> WshShell.Run("http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;q30505
> 3")
> WScript.quit();
> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> Microsoft MVP -- ASP/ASP.NET
> Please reply to the newsgroup. The email account listed in my From
> header is my spam trap, so I don't check it very often. You will get a
> quicker response by posting to the newsgroup.
> 
> 
>

date: Fri, 2 Dec 2005 12:56:02 -0800   author:   Larry