Re: White Space Problems--Again

[Stephan Beal]

On Sat, Mar 28, 2009 at 11:30 PM, Tom Browder <address@hidden> wrote:
> Can you give me an example of using a token of spaces in a Makefile?

If i could remember the one time it was useful, i'd have written it in
my original post ;).
i *think* it had to so something with joining a list of parameters,
but i won't swear to that. i did however find an old snippet where i
explicitly came across this problem:

toc2.platform.file_extensions.exe =# no whitespace, please

i remember that causing me grief when i had a space after the '=', and
added the comment marker to ensure that it stays empty.

> I'm really having a hard time seeing why it would be proscribed in
> POSIX, too.

Probably for historical reasons, since the standard was written long
after make was commonplace. There's a *lot* of makefile code in the
world, and changing any given standards-defined behaviour might indeed
break 1 or even 2 projects.

>  I'm used to quoting a token if I want embedded spaces
> (and the use of spaces for structure in Python is one of the reasons I
> can't get excited about Python, nor do I like spaces in filenames).

(i avoid python for the same reason.)

While looking through my docs for a practical use i still haven't
found one, but i did find mention of the $(strip) function, which
normalizes whitespace - strips leading/trailing and compresses
multiple spaces into a single space. That might be helpful in your
case.

-- 
----- stephan beal
http://wanderinghorse.net/home/stephan/