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Hello Eric,
Many thanks for your explanation. It makes sense and now the
"defn" versus double quoting approaches are clear.
Best regards,
Denis/
On 03/08/2018 10:58 PM, Eric Blake wrote:
On
03/08/2018 03:29 PM, Denis Valois wrote:
Hello m4 wizards,
My problem is passing a single parenthesis as a macro argument.
I do
not understand m4 behavior; this tells me that I miss some
fundamentals.
example 1: notice the litteral `('
index(`abcdef', `(')
this works perfectly with the expected results -1.
example 2: use of a macro
define(`c', `(')
index(`abcdef', c)
Here we have "ERROR: end of file in argument list". This is
because the
macro c is expanded before index so the parenthesis are
unbalanced.
Yep. During argument collection, m4 groups all text between
unquoted () as part of a single argument, so you have to have
balanced () if they are unquoted. And once the macro "c" is
expanded, you have introduced an unquoted ( into the stream that
m4 is processing:
index(`abcdef', ()
as that lacks a closing ), you get the syntax error about end of
file.
(Why are unquoted parenthesis special? So you can do things like:
define(`cat', `$1$2')
cat(`index', (`abcdef', `b'))
which passes only two (not three) arguments to cat(), and is a
long-hand way of writing index(`abcdef', `b'). Annoyingly,
unpaired parenthesis are more common than you think: in autoconf,
shell case statements tend to have more ')' than '(', leading to
tricks like:
case $foo in # for balance (
bar) ... ;;
esac
in the input handed to m4.)
Other approaches such as
builtin(`index', `abcdef', `c')
That expanded the same as:
index(`abcdef', `c')
which is not the contents of macro c like you wanted.
are either expanding to a wrong result or
generate a run-time error. I
simply do not see how to pass a macro defined with a parenthesis
as
argument.
It sounds like you want:
index(`abcdef', defn(`c'))
the defn() macro outputs the quoted value of macro c, which is
then equivalent to what you originally used with a literal quoted
string.
Another thing you could try is defining "c" to be a quoted rather
than bare unmatched parenthesis:
define(`c', ``('')
which may be what you want depending on where you expand the macro
"c".
In general, life with mismatched parenthesis can be tricky, but
it's puzzlers like that which are fun to help on, so feel free to
ask further related questions.
--
Denis Valois/
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