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From: minow@decvax.UUCP (Martin Minow)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: newlines in string constants
Message-ID: <167@decvax.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 7-Oct-87 18:28:40 EDT
Article-I.D.: decvax.167
Posted: Wed Oct  7 18:28:40 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 10-Oct-87 12:32:00 EDT
References: <2669@xanth.UUCP>
Reply-To: minow@decvax.UUCP (Martin Minow)
Organization: Digital Eq. Corp. - Merrimack NH.
Lines: 47

In article <2669@xanth.UUCP> kyle@xanth.UUCP (Kyle Jones) would like
to have multi-line string constants without the annoying \n\ at the
end of each line.
The problem with allowing multi-line string constants without \<nl> tags
is that a missing terminating quote is discovered only when the compiler
falls off the end of the file (or trips over another string).  If you
have more strings, you are in the amusing situation of compiling strings
and "stringing" code.  If you want to include a massive amount of text,
you can write a simple pre-processor such as the following (untested).
I used something similar to build a 10Kbyte string for an application.
This caused interesting hiccoughs in the compiler.

#include <stdio.h>
#define FALSE	0
#define TRUE	1

main() {
	int		nl_pending = FALSE;
	int		c;

	putchar('"');
	while ((c = getchar()) != EOF) {
	    if (nl_pending) {
		putchar('\\');		/* \n			*/
		putchar('n');
		putchar('\\');		/* \ to continue string	*/
		putchar('\n');		/* end of line		*/
		nl_pending = FALSE;
	    }
	    if (c == '\n')
		nl_pending = TRUE;
	    else {
		putchar(c);
	    }
	}
	putchar('"');
	putchar('\n');
}

Note, by the way, that Ansi C lets you write long strings as
	char foo[] =	"abc"
			"def"
			"ghi";
You still have to add the \n explicitly.

Martin Minow
decvax!minow