Protecting paths in macro expansions by extending UTF-8 (nullprogram.com)
from tedu to programming on 11 Mar 2024 07:45
https://azorius.net/g/programming/p/r42rdfcxjpC9wy5Sgb-Protecting-paths-in-macro-expansions-by-extendin

After a year I’ve finally came up with an elegant solution to a vexing u-config problem. The pkg-config format uses macros to generate build flags through recursive expansion. Some flags embed file system paths, but to the macro system it’s all strings. The output is also ultimately just one big string, which the receiving shell splits into fields. If a path contains spaces, or shell metacharacters, u-config must escape them so that shells treat them as part of a token. But how can u-config itself distinguish incidental spaces in paths from deliberate spaces between flags? What about other shell metacharacters in paths? My solution is to extend UTF-8 to encode metadata that survives macro expansion.

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