Before I forget, let me share with you a fantastic way to read values from Registry into a batch file variable.

Say you need to determine, what is the date format of this machine.  Normally you would read a value from HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\International like this:

REG QUERY "HKCU\Control Panel\International" /v sShortDate

That command will produce an output similar to this:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\International
sShortDate    REG_SZ    M/d/yyyy

But you do not need all that.  All you need is the string  “M/d/yyyy” (or “yyyy-MM-dd”).  To get just that string you need to skip to a second line and read third field on the last line.  How you can do that in a batch file?

Look at this batch command below.  It does just that:

FOR /F "skip=2 tokens=2,*" %%A IN ('reg.exe query "HKCU\Control Panel\International" /v "sShortDate"') DO set "DFMT=%%B"
ECHO New variable DFMT = %DFMT%

This amazing command sets variable DFMT to a value stored in REG key sShortDate.  It skips two lines (skip=2).  It uses default delimiter space (no code is needed).  It ignores first two fields (tokens=2,*), and puts everything that remains into %B.

Note: Syntax tokens=2,3 would also work in this case because output doesn’t contain any spaces.  This would mean, skip first two fields and use third field as %B.  We use double percent sign (%%)  in %%B to indicate that this a variable and not an input parameter.

Fantastic!  Now variable DFMT contains string “M/d/yyyy”.  Based on this variable I can further direct my script to extract year from a proper position from an output of a DATE command.

Note:  you have to place this command in *.BAT or *.CMD file.  You cannot run this from a command prompt.