Use of Define symbols (-D) with the semicolon ";" sign in STM32CubeIDE

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@pav_ivanovs wrote:

For this, I'm creating the following Define symbol (-D) in STM32CubeIDE, by going to project Properties -> C/C++ Build -> Settings -> Tool Settings -> MCU GCC Assembler -> Preprocessor:

you are creating a #define for the "MCU GCC Assembler". do it in the "MCU GCC compiler" section instead.

Ok, I've added the same symbol there, but the result is the same

Is there an error reported by compiler ?

I suggest to remove the double quotes. Especially the double quote that is on the second line.

In your C code, how do you use THIS_FILE__ ? I suggest to add a semi colon after THIS_FILE__ on a single line:

THIS_FILE__;

Try to find in the CDT build console what command line is really used ( "arm-none-eabi-gcc c:/path/to/file.c -DTHIS_FILE=...")

That's not how define works. A define creates a symbol that can be used for text substitution or conditional compilation. It's not designed to add code to a file. That's what include is for.

You can define the symbol like this:

The index keeps track of all the symbols in the code, so you can navigate to declarations and definitions of variables and functions. If you change global symbols all files have to be recompiled and this potentially affects the index.

I have a better solution. Use the -include command to force include a file in all source files without modifying the files. You will need to create one header file.

global.h:

#ifndef GLOBAL_H_
#define GLOBAL_H_

#define thisFile __FILE__

#endif // GLOBAL_H_

And in my main.c:

SerialDebug("%s\r\n", thisFile);

Thanks for advice, but unfortunately, it doesn't do exactly what I want. My initial purpose of adding the

static char const thisFile[] = __FILE__;

line at the top of each source file was to create a string that contains the file path only once per source file. The typical issue with debugging using the __FILE__ macro is that it expands to a long path string each time I write

SerialDebug("%s\r\n", thisFile);

and I might have a lot of such calls within a source file. So it basically, clogs up memory pretty quickly. The solution that I'm trying to implement is described here:
https://barrgroup.com/blog/design-contract-embedded-c#endnote2
but it relies on adding

DEFINE_THIS_FILE

macro at the top of each source file, which I would like to automate somehow.

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@pav_ivanovs wrote:

I want to automatically add the following line of code at the top of each source file within my project:

static char const thisFile[] = __FILE__;

file?

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I don't see how a preprocessor definition helps this at all?

Surely, if you can automatically insert a preprocessor definition, then you could just as easily directly insert that line of text?

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@pav_ivanovs wrote:

it shows this warning, which I don't completely understand.

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This Index is what allows the editor to automatically do cross-referencing, find things referenced via macros, highlight "inactive" condition code, etc, etc.

Obviously, when you change a command-line define, that's going to affect this.

__FILE_NAME__

Takes less space then __FILE__. It doesn't have the full path only filename and extension. It is not standard, but it works in GCC.

The compiler is smart enough not to create duplicates of strings in FLASH so even if you use string literals in different places in one file it won't be duplicated. Unless you concatenate the strings, because those are seen as new ones. Strings are passed by address, not by copy.

You can use the -E parameter to get the intermediate files (main.o becomes a readable text file, for instance). It will result in compiler errors, but you can see what the preprocessor outputs. You can see that __FILE_NAME__ gets expanded to "main.c" and the compiler will store that in 1 place in FLASH.