compose-string

Arguments: &rest args

This macro implements a convenient notation for representing a character string containing characters that may be difficult to edit into a source code file. The value is a string that is concatenated from the string form of the arguments:

• A string: The string is inserted verbatim into the result string.
• A character: The character is inserted verbatim.
• An integer: If the integer is in the 16-bit Unicode range, insert the corresponding Unicode character. If the integer is in the high Unicode range, insert the two corresponding surrogate characters. Otherwise signal an error.
• :[ -- The arguments following this argument up to an occurrence of :] are converted to hexadecimal character codes and the corresponding characters are inserted.

  The sequence :[ aa bb 20 e3b4 10a234 :] denotes the 6 characters: four with character codes #xaa #xbb #x20 #xe3b4 and the two surrogate characters needed to represent the Unicode code point #x10a234.

• :eval: The following argument is an expression that will be evaluated to compute a string or character component of the result string.
• A symbol: If the name of the symbol is a single character, that character is inserted; otherwise, the symbol is treated as the name of a character and the named character is inserted.

If there are no occurrences of the :eval argument, the result emitted by the macro is a constant string. If the :eval argument is used, the macro emits a call to the compose-string-fn function.

See iacl.htm for more information on international characters and external formats.

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This page was not revised from the 10.0 page.
Created 2019.8.20.