Info Catalog m4: Invoking m4 m4: Top m4: Macros

m4: Syntax

 
 3 Lexical and syntactic conventions
 ***********************************
 
 As 'm4' reads its input, it separates it into "tokens".  A token is
 either a name, a quoted string, or any single character, that is not a
 part of either a name or a string.  Input to 'm4' can also contain
 comments.  GNU 'm4' does not yet understand multibyte locales; all
 operations are byte-oriented rather than character-oriented (although if
 your locale uses a single byte encoding, such as ISO-8859-1, you will
 not notice a difference).  However, 'm4' is eight-bit clean, so you can
 use non-ASCII characters in quoted strings (⇒Changequote),
 comments (⇒Changecom), and macro names (⇒Indir), with the
 exception of the NUL character (the zero byte ''\0'').
 

Menu

 
· Names                       Macro names
· Quoted strings              Quoting input to 'm4'
· Comments                    Comments in 'm4' input
· Other tokens                Other kinds of input tokens
· Input processing            How 'm4' copies input to output
 

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