MACRO to capitalize first letter of a word in header.

[dissectcode]

I know about toupper() and tolower() but I need to capitalize (or de-capitalize)the first letter of a word in a header file. I know there are no preprocessor functions that do that but is there another way?

[Banfa]

I think I would be forced to ask why? and over how many files?

For a small number of files then a text editor is probably your best bet.

For more files you might be able to use an awk script to automate a lot of the process or a perl script.

Ultimately you could write you own text processing program.

[dissectcode]

This would be done over 50 files, and they are needed to be capitalized in order to feed the word in the proper format, as an input into another macro.

I would like to keep this in a C header file.

[donbock]

I suggest you edit the header files to get the capitalization correct. You might have been able to alter 50 header files in the time since this thread was started.

How many different words do you need to alter? The following is a really bad idea ... suppose you only need to change "big" to "Big" and "Small" to "small"

#define big Big
#define Small small
...
#include <header>
...
call the macros that use "big" and "Small"
...
#undef big
#undef Small
...

This is a bad idea because
1. There may be instances of "big" and "Small" that you don't want to change.
2. You are going out of your way to make your code hard for anybody to understand.
3. Corollary to #1 and #2 above ... someday you may modify the program to insert the word "big" or "Small" without any desire for it to be changed.

[dissectcode]

@donbock

This is definitely on the right track - to answer your question, I need to change to upper case, AND lower case in the same macro.

For example:

#define mac(name, val)  (Name *)(name->myMember.anum) = val
 

See how name input is Name AND name in the macro?

[donbock]

@dissectcode
How about this ...

 
typedef Name *ptr_name;
...
#define mac(name, val) (ptr_##name)(name->myMember.anum) = val
 

[dissectcode]

I need to change "name" to Name for the cast, and make sure it is in lower case for the structure name.

Also - "name" is arbitrary so I couldn't typedef it to one thing ?

[donbock]

What I meant was ... suppose you have three "names" (foo, bar, and squid) ... that means you want the following code to appear after all macro expansions:

 
Foo foo;
Bar bar;
Squid squid;
...
(Foo *) (foo->myMember.anum) = fooVal;
(Bar *) (bar->myMember.anum) = barVal;
(Squid *) (squid->myMember.anum) = squidVal;
 

My suggestion is to get the equivalent through the following ...

 
typedef Foo *ptr_foo;
typedef Bar *ptr_bar;
typedef Squid *ptr_squid;
...
#define mac(name, val) (ptr_ ## name)(name->myMember.anum) = val
...
Foo foo;
Bar bar;
Squid squid;
...
mac(foo, fooVal);
mac(bar, barVal);
mac(squid, squidVal);
 

These macros expand into the three lines:

 
(ptr_foo)(foo->myMember.anum) = fooVal;
(ptr_bar)(bar->myMember.anum) = barVal;
(ptr_squid)(squid->myMember.anum) = squidVal;
 

Which, because of the typedefs, is equivalent to what you want.

I haven't tried this out on a compiler, so there might be syntax issues for you to work out, but I'm pretty sure the concept is valid.

[dissectcode]

@donbock

Thank you for your response. After looking through this code and concept - I am concerned that I cannot create a more general macro for any input during run-time....since it is a preprocessor thing, it does the concatenation at compile-time. Is this true?

[Tassos Souris]

Yes it is true.. this is done at compile time..

Can you give us a example of how you want this to work at run-time?