Using Invoke-Expression in Powershell with Spaces in Paths

One of the early bugs found in Exchange Analyzer was an error being thrown when the final HTML report was displayed. I had been developing the script in a folder path of X:\Scripts\ExchangeAnalyzer. In other words, a path with no spaces. Some of the early users then tried to run the script from a path such as X:\Scripts\Exchange Analyzer and reported errors.

Here’s an example of what went wrong. Let’s say we’ve got an HTML file in C:\Scripts, and it’s called “Test Document.html”. If I use Invoke-Expression to launch that HTML file, an error will be thrown:

PS C:\Scripts> Invoke-Expression '.\Test Document.html'

.\Test : The term '.\Test' is not recognized as the name of a cmdlet, function, script file,
or operable program. Check the spelling of the name, or if a path was included, verify that
the path is correct and try again.

As it turns out, Invoke-Expression doesn’t handle spaces in paths like that. But there’s a couple of easy fixes that you can use.

One fix is to use the following command instead:

PS C:\Scripts> Invoke-Expression "& '.\Test Document.html'"

That will also work if the path to the document is stored in a variable.

PS C:\Scripts> $document = "C:\Scripts\Test Document.html"

PS C:\Scripts> Invoke-Expression "& '$document'"

The other option is to escape the spaces in the path, for example:

PS C:\Scripts> $document = "C:\Scripts\Test Document.html"

PS C:\Scripts> $document = $document -replace ' ','` '

PS C:\Scripts> Invoke-Expression $document

The first option is probably better, as it doesn’t require you to modify the existing variable or set a new variable for the path with escaped spaces. But either option should solve the problem of using Invoke-Expression with spaces in the path.