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According to Roberto Bagnara on 9/19/2008 1:31 AM:

Hi there,

Hello Roberto,

I hope this mailing list is appropriate for a question about how to debug m4 texts.

Yes, this is the right list.

The problem is simple: we have a system composed by several m4 texts and quite often we end up with spurious spacing in the output. The problem is that we don't know, of the many m4 texts included by the main one, which one(s) is(are) causing the spurious spacing.

Is there a trick that could be used in order to debug this?

Have you used 'traceon'? If you want really verbose output, I like using the '-daeqt' command-line option (or debugmode(`aeqt') from within the input file); that shows what macros expand to, and includes quotes, so that you can spot the extra whitespace in your macro expansions.

Remember, m4 strips leading spaces during argument collection, but not trailing spaces. It may be that you have trailing spaces in your macro arguments, which result in the extra whitespace in your output.

- -- Don't work too hard, make some time for fun as well!

Eric Blake ebb9@byu.net