Re: variables with spaces

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Mon, 31 Mar 2003 13:50:49 -0500
> From: "Paul D. Smith" <address@hidden>
> 
> Then the question becomes how to encode them?  I was playing with the
> idea of replacing space characters with some control character, like
> ASCII 0x01 or something.  Then none of the make parsing functions would
> treat it like whitespace, and we'd just have to translate it back again
> before printing it.  It also has the advantage that the string is the
> same length before and after encoding/decoding.
> 
> Then I realized that make support multiple locales and some of the
> charsets people might use to write makefiles in might use control chars
> like 0x01.  I'm not very familiar with that so I can't say whether it
> would be true or not... Eli, you probably are much more able than I to
> talk about whether this is viable or not.

Is it possible to use some sequence of ASCII characters which are
unlikely to appear in a filename, to encode a whitespace?

If not, then the only alternative seems to be to escape the blanks
with something like \, and then have lots og hairy code to deal with
that.  Yikes; but what else could one do?  Unix users don't even have
the 8+3 short alias ``work-around''.