VB & VBA in a Nutshell: The Language

Command Function

Named Arguments

No

Syntax

Command

Description

Returns the arguments used when launching VB or an application created with VB.

Rules at a Glance

• For applications created with VB and compiled into an EXE, Command returns a string containing everything entered after the name of the executable file.

• This function isn't implemented in hosted versions of VBA. Regardless of any command line that may be passed to the host application, Command returns a null string.

Example

The following example demonstrates how to parse command-line arguments to set up a series of options in your executable. This example (which is bereft of all error handling) looks for a hyphen or a forward slash in the command line arguments and assumes that the following character is a command line switch. Given the command-line arguments:

-d:50 -f -g -k

the program displays the following in the Immediate window:

Got option d
Option d Parameter = 50
Got option f
Got option g
Got option k

The source code is as follows:

Private Sub ParseCommandLine() Dim i As Integer Dim s As String Dim iParam As Integer For i = 1 To Len(Command) If Mid$(Command, i, 1) Like "[-/]" Then s = Mid$(Command, i + 1, 1) Select Case s Case Is = "d" Debug.Print "Got option d" iParam = Int(Mid$(Command, i + 3, 2)) Debug.Print "Option d Parameter = " & _ CStr(iParam) Case Is = "f" Debug.Print "Got option f" Case Is = "g" Debug.Print "Got option g" Case Is = "k" Debug.Print "Got option k" Case Is = "l" Debug.Print "Got option ...