Re: Output quoting (was: Re: Possible solution for special characters in makefile paths)

[Tim Murphy]

On 10 April 2014 18:47, Frank Heckenbach <address@hidden> wrote:
> Tim Murphy wrote:

>> Paul wrote that this:
>>    FILENAME = foo\ bar biz\ baz
>>
>>    $(file >$(FILENAME),hi)
>> should return an error.
>
> Because it contains an unquoted space which would be a word-separator.

I'm stupid - I didn't see the missing unquote. sorry :-)

> If you want a single file name, write:
>
>     FILENAME = foo\ bar\ biz\ baz
>
>> I was suggesting >> as an argument why start/end delimiters  such as
>> $[ and ] are
>> not so bad because make already has delimiters for function parameters
>> such as those
>> of $file - whether or not it uses them.
>
> Unfortunately, that's not enough. Consider a function such as
> $(filter). It has 2 arguments (separated by a comma). Each of those
> arguments can be a list of strings, separated by whitespace. So each
> of those strings cannot contain a comma or whitespace yet. When we
> we want to change that, we'll need some way of quoting or escaping,
> whether \, $[] or whatever.

Yes indeed, and since $ is already an "escape character" in make, it is
a great thing to use since . e.g. This might
be horrible but there should be less concern about it being
incompatible in some way:

foo$ bar$ biz$ baz

i.e. $<space>

Actually I hate that and I'm really arguing towards $[] or even $"".

:-)

Regards,

Tim