Microsoft KB Archive/57949

From BetaArchive Wiki
Knowledge Base


INFO: Use of the Stringizing Operator (#) in Macros

Article ID: 57949

Article Last Modified on 12/11/2003



APPLIES TO

  • Microsoft Visual C++ 1.0 Professional Edition
  • Microsoft Visual C++ 1.5 Professional Edition
  • Microsoft Visual C++ 2.0 Professional Edition
  • Microsoft Visual C++ 4.0 Standard Edition
  • Microsoft Visual C++ 5.0 Enterprise Edition
  • Microsoft Visual C++ 6.0 Enterprise Edition
  • Microsoft Visual C++ 5.0 Professional Edition
  • Microsoft Visual C++ 6.0 Professional Edition
  • Microsoft Visual C++ 6.0 Standard Edition



This article was previously published under Q57949


SUMMARY

In Microsoft C for MS-DOS and Windows NT, when you are writing a preprocessor macro that takes an argument that must appear in quotation marks, you can use the # sign to expand the argument. One implementation of this preprocessor directive is the use of printf() in the macro. The following code demonstrates an example:

Sample Code

#define PR(fmt,value) printf("value = %" #fmt "\n", (value))

#include <stdio.h>

void main(void)
{
   float afl;

   afl = 3.14f;
   PR(5.2f, afl);
}
                

The sample code outputs the following string:

   value =  3.14
                

The # sign in front of the fmt variable allows the macro to be expanded using quotation marks. Note that the preprocessor concatenates consecutive pairs of double quotation marks so that the following string

   "value = %""5.2f""\n"
                

is translated into the following:

   "value = %5.2f\n"
                


Additional query words: pound number

Keywords: kbinfo kblangc KB57949