C preprocessor macro for returning a string repeated a certain number of times

Question

Does someone know of any C99 preprocessor magic that allows for creating a string consisting of another string repeated N times?

E.g.

STRREP( "%s ", 3 )

becomes

"%s %s %s "

after preprocessing.

The only thing I could think of myself was something like this

#define STRREP( str, N ) STRREP_##N( str )    
#define STRREP_0(str) ""
#define STRREP_1(str) str
#define STRREP_2(str) str str
#define STRREP_3(str) str str str
...

which works well, but is ugly as I have to define a macro for each repetition length manually. I want to use it together with variadic macros and the macro returning the number of macro arguments shown here.

Answer 1

Since it's a macro and N is a numeric constant anyway, how about this?

#include <stdio.h>

#define REP0(X)
#define REP1(X) X
#define REP2(X) REP1(X) X
#define REP3(X) REP2(X) X
#define REP4(X) REP3(X) X
#define REP5(X) REP4(X) X
#define REP6(X) REP5(X) X
#define REP7(X) REP6(X) X
#define REP8(X) REP7(X) X
#define REP9(X) REP8(X) X
#define REP10(X) REP9(X) X

#define REP(HUNDREDS,TENS,ONES,X) \
  REP##HUNDREDS(REP10(REP10(X))) \
  REP##TENS(REP10(X)) \
  REP##ONES(X)

int main(void)
{
  printf(REP(9,0,7, "*")); // "*" repeated 907 times
  printf(REP(0,9,2, "#")); // "#" repeated 92 times
  printf(REP(0,0,1, "@")); // "@" repeated 1 times
  return 0;
}