cmd - using batch echo with special characters

Question

This maybe really easy but there were no answers for it over the net. I want to echo a XML line via batch into a file but it misunderstands the XML closing tag for redirection ">". The line is as follows:

echo <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?> > myfile.xml

is there any way to give a hint to batch parser not to interpret a special string? I used double-quotes but it writes them to the file as well! The file should look like this after echo:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>

Answer 1

You can escape shell metacharacters with ^:

echo ^<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?^> > myfile.xml

Note that since echo is a shell built-in it doesn't follow the usual conventions regarding quoting, so just quoting the argument will output the quotes instead of removing them.