Re: Quick question: joining strings

[Paul Smith]

On Fri, 2008-08-01 at 16:57 -0400, Yang Zhang wrote:
> Hi, if I have "xs := a b c", how do I get "a:b:c"?

You need to use "subst" on spaces.  But, it's tricky to do this; there's
no good way to "escape" a space inside a function argument.

However, you can hide anything from make's function parsing by putting
it inside a variable, since make chops up the arguments BEFORE it
expands anything.

Getting a space into a variable is ALSO a little tricky.  Do this:

        # make an empty variable
        E =
        # Make a variable containing exactly one space:
        S = $(E) $(E)

        # now you can subst:
                $(subst $(S),:,$(xs))