Re: Having Trouble with m4 Input (m4 version 1.4.13)

[Eric Blake]

On 09/03/2010 12:31 PM, Tom Browder wrote:
> However, can anyone point to a good source of "practical" m4 macros
> outside the autoconf arena?  I looked at several but I didn't see any
> plain text processing macros outside autoconf use.

Bison is another package that uses m4; but that borrows from m4sugar as 
well.  I'm not sure what other packages use m4 on a regular basis.

> And what is the best practice regarding quotes?  When I had my first
> experience with m4 it was build configuration related and the square
> bracket quoting was fine and seemed "natural" (if anything in m4 can
> be said to be natural).  It certainly helps see them better.

If you ever plan on mixing shell code with m4 (either by using [e]syscmd 
a lot, or by doing like autoconf and using m4 to generate shell 
scripts), then changing away from `' is a practical must, at which point 
[] works well.  But if you use m4 to pre-process files into html, then 
`' generally works.  You may also try the style of using quote strings 
that are longer than one byte, which is less likely to occur within the 
text being quoted.

--
Eric Blake   address@hidden    +1-801-349-2682
Libvirt virtualization library http://libvirt.org