> I noticed a potential problem with this. With a line mask like:
> %2:%3%4%5
> ztree encloses the whole thing in quotes. Then when I try to read it
> into Excel using the tab as a delimiter, it treats it as one field.
Sorry, but I don't follow. That line mask has no TABs, or other separators that I can see. If you don't mean it to be read as one field, then what else do you expect to happen?
I guess the above is not the real-life case, and it helped if you provided a complete example with full inputs and expected outcome.
Very generally speaking, if it's about passing paths and/or filenames to Excel, then it would be easiest to explicitly quote them, use ',' comma as a separator, and save it as a .csv file. This would work since valid pathnames can contain neither quotes nor control chars (including TAB), and Excel opens .csv files natively while discarding the outer quotes around each string field. But of course, you could be meaning something completely different.
Cheers,
Liviu