m4: Translit
11.5 Translating characters
===========================
Character translation is done with 'translit':
-- Builtin: translit (STRING, CHARS, [REPLACEMENT])
Expands to STRING, with each character that occurs in CHARS
translated into the character from REPLACEMENT with the same index.
If REPLACEMENT is shorter than CHARS, the excess characters of
CHARS are deleted from the expansion; if CHARS is shorter, the
excess characters in REPLACEMENT are silently ignored. If
REPLACEMENT is omitted, all characters in STRING that are present
in CHARS are deleted from the expansion. If a character appears
more than once in CHARS, only the first instance is used in making
the translation. Only a single translation pass is made, even if
characters in REPLACEMENT also appear in CHARS.
As a GNU extension, both CHARS and REPLACEMENT can contain
character-ranges, e.g., 'a-z' (meaning all lowercase letters) or
'0-9' (meaning all digits). To include a dash '-' in CHARS or
REPLACEMENT, place it first or last in the entire string, or as the
last character of a range. Back-to-back ranges can share a common
endpoint. It is not an error for the last character in the range
to be 'larger' than the first. In that case, the range runs
backwards, i.e., '9-0' means the string '9876543210'. The
expansion of a range is dependent on the underlying encoding of
characters, so using ranges is not always portable between
machines.
The macro 'translit' is recognized only with parameters.
translit(`GNUs not Unix', `A-Z')
=>s not nix
translit(`GNUs not Unix', `a-z', `A-Z')
=>GNUS NOT UNIX
translit(`GNUs not Unix', `A-Z', `z-a')
=>tmfs not fnix
translit(`+,-12345', `+--1-5', `<;>a-c-a')
=><;>abcba
translit(`abcdef', `aabdef', `bcged')
=>bgced
In the ASCII encoding, the first example deletes all uppercase
letters, the second converts lowercase to uppercase, and the third
'mirrors' all uppercase letters, while converting them to lowercase.
The two first cases are by far the most common, even though they are not
portable to EBCDIC or other encodings. The fourth example shows a range
ending in '-', as well as back-to-back ranges. The final example shows
that 'a' is mapped to 'b', not 'c'; the resulting 'b' is not further
remapped to 'g'; the 'd' and 'e' are swapped, and the 'f' is discarded.
Omitting CHARS evokes a warning, but still produces output.
translit(`abc')
error->m4:stdin:1: Warning: too few arguments to builtin `translit'
=>abc
Info Catalog
m4: Substr
m4: Text handling
m4: Patsubst