Concatenate string constants

Question

Please take a look at following example (I have Java background):

const char* BT_ADDRESS = "abcd,ef,ghijkl";

void bar(const char* string) {
  ...
}

void foo() {
   bar("AT+BIND=" + BT_ADDRESS);
   bar("AT+LINK=" + BT_ADDRESS);
}

How to achieve this with "Arduino-C++" so BT_ADDRESS only has to be entered at one location?

Answer 1

There is, as you may expect with C, many different ways of doing this.

The simplest is probably to use, instead of a const variable, a preprocessor macro.

In C you can concatenate string literals like this:

print("AT+BIND=" "abcd,ef,ghijkl");

Note the lack of anything but spaces between the strings - they are concatenated together. You can even do it on separate lines - it's a technique that is great for incredibly long strings.

Now you can, of course, replace one of those with a preprocessor macro:

#define BT_ADDRESS "abcd,ef,ghijkl"
print("AT+BIND=" BT_ADDRESS);
print("AT+LINK=" BT_ADDRESS);

The preprocessing replaces BT_ADDRESS with the string literal "abcd,ef,ghijkl" and all is well.

Other options, depending on what print does, is to expand it to take two const char * parameters and deal with them both separately. For instance, you might have:

void print(const char *command, const char *data) {
    Serial.print(command);
    Serial.println(data);
}

print("AT+BIND=", BT_ADDRESS);

If you don't know how many parameters you may want to pass you could use variadic arguments:

#include <stdarg.h>

void print(int count, ...) {
    va_list args;
    va_start args, count);

    for (int i = 0; i < count; i++) {
        const char *arg = va_arg(args, const char *);
        Serial.print(arg);
    }
    va_end(args);
}

print(2, "AT+BIND=", BT_ADDRESS);

Yet another option is to pre-format the data into a single string using the various string operators. For example:

int len = strlen("AT+BIND=") + strlen(BT_ADDRESS);
char temp[len + 1]; // Be sure to keep space for the terminating NULL.
strcpy(temp, "AT+BIND=");
strcat(BT_ADDRESS);
print(temp);

I could go on all night with different options... The first one using the preprocessor is probably easiest though.

Answer 2

Get rid of strange print() and use standard stdout, fprintf() and % format tokens.

#include <stdio.h>
#include <Stream.h>

// printf to file support http://arduino.cc/playground/Main/Printf  
// we need fundamental FILE definitions and printf declarations
// apparently it eats 1k FLASH by saves to much copy&paste and hopefully even FLASH 

// create a output function
// This works because Serial.write, although of
// type virtual, already exists.
static int stream_putchar (char c, FILE *stream) {
    ((Stream*)(stream->udata))->write(c);
    return 0;
}

void SetupFileStream(FILE* file, Print* stream) {
    fdev_setup_stream(file, stream_putchar, NULL, _FDEV_SETUP_WRITE);
    file->udata = stream;
}

#ifdef UDRE0
// non interrupt transmit function
static int uart_putchar (char c, FILE *stream) {
    volatile byte *ucsrna = (byte*)(stream->udata);
    while ( !bitRead( ucsrna[0], UDRE0) ) {;}  // wait for transmit buffer is empty
    ucsrna[&UDR0-&UCSR0A] = c;
    return 0;
}

void SetupUartStream(FILE* file, volatile byte *ucsrna) {
    fdev_setup_stream(file, uart_putchar, NULL, _FDEV_SETUP_WRITE);
    file->udata = (void*) ucsrna;
}
#endif

#define INFO(fmt, args...) \
    fprintf_P(stderr, PROGSTR("INFO: " fmt), ## args);

// create a FILE structure to reference our UART output function in main project file
static FILE myStdOut = {0};
void setup() {
....
    Serial.begin(19200);
    SetupUartStream(&myStdOut, &UCSR0A);   // when debugging in AvrStudio then debugger is saturated by debug messages in user data empty interrupt handler if used buffered stream output
    // The uart is the standard output device STDOUT
    stdout = &myStdOut;
    stderr = stdout;
...
} 

....
const char* BT_ADDRESS_RAM = "abcd,ef,ghijkl";
const char* PROGMEM BT_ADDRESS_FLASH = "abcd,ef,ghijkl";


INFO("AT+BIND=%s", BT_ADDRESS_RAM);
INFO("AT+BIND=%S", BT_ADDRESS_FLASH);