Visual Studio PreBuildEvent powershell The string is missing the terminator: "

Question

Had the strangest error earlier that I was genuinely confused about, so I thought I would write up a self-answer to help people out. My googlefu turned up nothing neatly, so here we are.

This was my original line

<PreBuildEvent>powershell.exe -noninteractive -command "$(solutiondir)\..\PreBuild.ps1" "$(TargetFileName)" "$(ProjectDir)" "$(SolutionDir)"</PreBuildEvent>

and here's my PreBuild.ps1 file:

Param(
    [Parameter(Mandatory=$false)][string]$targetFileName,
    [Parameter(Mandatory=$false)][string]$projectDir,
    [Parameter(Mandatory=$false)][string]$solutionDir
)
process {
    Write-Host "`$targetFileName $targetFileName";
    Write-Host "`$projectDir $projectDir";
    Write-Host "`$solutionDir $solutionDir";
}

For some reason the variable $projectDir in my script contains both the projectdir and the solutiondir. Like so:

2>  Processing files with gulp script.
2>  $targetFileName project.dll
2>  $projectDir c:\src\sln\project c:\src\sln

So I changed it to this

<PreBuildEvent>powershell.exe -noninteractive -command "$(solutiondir)\..\PreBuild.ps1" "$(TargetFileName)" "$(ProjectDir)"</PreBuildEvent>

and I get this error in VS Output: The string is missing the terminator: ".

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Jun 09 '17 at 03:38

Here's where I messed up. $(ProjectDir) ends with a trailing slash. So effectively my command is:

powershell.exe -noninteractive -command "c:\src\sln\project\..\PreBuild.ps1" "project.dll" "c:\src\sln\project\"

Do you see it? It's subtle, took me a few minutes. It's the \" at the end. That escapes the quote, making the string unbounded. Hence the missing closing quote.

So now if I put simply this line:

<PreBuildEvent>powershell.exe -noninteractive -command "$(solutiondir)\..\PreBuild.ps1" $(TargetFileName) $(ProjectDir)</PreBuildEvent>

It all works as expected. The quotes were really because I was afraid of spaces. If someone ends up with some in their paths, I'll go back and punt.

thanks for sharing your solution here, you could mark it as the answer, so it could help other community members who get the same issues. easier to find the answer — Leo Liu, Jun 12 '17 at 01:37
Thanks @Leo-MSFT just was just trying to give it a few days and forgot about it hahaha — jcolebrand, Jun 12 '17 at 01:44

Visual Studio PreBuildEvent powershell The string is missing the terminator: "

1 Answers1