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Macro Concatenation with the ## OperatorThe ## (double number sign) operator concatenates two tokens in a macro invocation (text and/or arguments) given in a macro definition. If a macro XY was defined using the following directive: #define XY(x,y) x##y.
In C, the strcat() function is used to concatenate two strings. It concatenates one string (the source) to the end of another string (the destination). The pointer of the source string is appended to the end of the destination string, thus concatenating both strings.
Concatenation means joining two strings into one. In the context of macro expansion, concatenation refers to joining two lexical units into one longer one. Specifically, an actual argument to the macro can be concatenated with another actual argument or with fixed text to produce a longer name.
The same + operator you use for adding two numbers can be used to concatenate two strings. You can also use += , where a += b is a shorthand for a = a + b .
If they're both strings you can just do:
#define STR3 STR1 STR2
This then expands to:
#define STR3 "s" "1"
and in the C language, separating two strings with space as in "s" "1" is exactly equivalent to having a single string "s1".
You don't need that sort of solution for string literals, since they are concatenated at the language level, and it wouldn't work anyway because "s""1" isn't a valid preprocessor token.
[Edit: In response to the incorrect "Just for the record" comment below that unfortunately received several upvotes, I will reiterate the statement above and observe that the program fragment
#define PPCAT_NX(A, B) A ## B
PPCAT_NX("s", "1")
produces this error message from the preprocessing phase of gcc: error: pasting ""s"" and ""1"" does not give a valid preprocessing token
]
However, for general token pasting, try this:
/*
* Concatenate preprocessor tokens A and B without expanding macro definitions
* (however, if invoked from a macro, macro arguments are expanded).
*/
#define PPCAT_NX(A, B) A ## B
/*
* Concatenate preprocessor tokens A and B after macro-expanding them.
*/
#define PPCAT(A, B) PPCAT_NX(A, B)
Then, e.g., both PPCAT_NX(s, 1) and PPCAT(s, 1) produce the identifier s1, unless s is defined as a macro, in which case PPCAT(s, 1) produces <macro value of s>1.
Continuing on the theme are these macros:
/*
* Turn A into a string literal without expanding macro definitions
* (however, if invoked from a macro, macro arguments are expanded).
*/
#define STRINGIZE_NX(A) #A
/*
* Turn A into a string literal after macro-expanding it.
*/
#define STRINGIZE(A) STRINGIZE_NX(A)
Then,
#define T1 s
#define T2 1
STRINGIZE(PPCAT(T1, T2)) // produces "s1"
By contrast,
STRINGIZE(PPCAT_NX(T1, T2)) // produces "T1T2"
STRINGIZE_NX(PPCAT_NX(T1, T2)) // produces "PPCAT_NX(T1, T2)"
#define T1T2 visit the zoo
STRINGIZE(PPCAT_NX(T1, T2)) // produces "visit the zoo"
STRINGIZE_NX(PPCAT(T1, T2)) // produces "PPCAT(T1, T2)"
Hint: The STRINGIZE macro above is cool, but if you make a mistake and its argument isn't a macro - you had a typo in the name, or forgot to #include the header file - then the compiler will happily put the purported macro name into the string with no error.
If you intend that the argument to STRINGIZE is always a macro with a normal C value, then
#define STRINGIZE(A) ((A),STRINGIZE_NX(A))
will expand it once and check it for validity, discard that, and then expand it again into a string.
It took me a while to figure out why STRINGIZE(ENOENT) was ending up as "ENOENT" instead of "2"... I hadn't included errno.h.
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