Can pre-ANSI C Preprocessor handle symbolic constants in strings?

[Roy Johnson]

In article <DLBRES14.91May31050315 at pc.usl.edu> dlbres14 at pc.usl.edu (Brumley David M) writes:
> In ANSI C it seems possible to use the Preprocessor to do macro
> substitution of constants in strings:

> #define FIELDSIZE 42
> #define quote(val) #val

> char buffer[FIELDSIZE+1];
> ...
> /* read a field of length FIELDSIZE */
> scanf("%" quote(FIELDSIZE) "s", buffer); 
> ...

> So that after the Preprocessor, the 'scanf' call becomes:

> scanf("%42s", buffer);

> Question:  How do I do this with a preprocessor that doesn't
> understand the new ANSI '#' operator nor string concatenation?  Do I
> have to build the string argument dynamically (allocating an extra
> buffer in the process)?

You might, for this example, want to do

scanf("%*s", FIELDSIZE, buffer);

which is standard/portable.  Otherwise you will have to hack
string concatenation until you get an ANSI compiler.
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Roy Johnson, Shell Development Company