Guy Rutenberg

Today I came across an annoying problem, how do I expand a C macro into a string?

One of C’s preprocessor operators is the # which surrounds the token that follows it in the replacement text with double quotes (“). So, at first the solution sounds pretty simple, just define

#define STR(tok) #tok

and things will work. However, there is one caveat: it will not work if passed another macro. For example,

#define BUF_LEN 100
#define STR(tok) #tok
 
STR(BUF_LEN)

will produce after going through the preprocessor

"BUF_LEN"

instead of "100", which is undesired. This behavior is due to the C standard noting that no macro expansions should happen to token preceded by #.

However, after reconsidering the source of the problem, I’ve found the following workaround: define another macro which will expand the argument and only then call the macro which does the quoting.

#define STR_EXPAND(tok) #tok
#define STR(tok) STR_EXPAND(tok)
 
#define BUF_LEN 100
 
STR(BUF_LEN)

will produce

"100"

as desired.

Explanation: The STR macro calls the STR_EXPAND macro with its argument. Unlike in the first example, this time the parameter is checked for macro expansions and evaluated by the preprocessor before being passed to STR_EXPAND which quotes it, thus giving the desired behavior.