Passing variable number of arguments around

Question

Say I have a C function which takes a variable number of arguments: How can I call another function which expects a variable number of arguments from inside of it, passing a

Answer 1

There's no way of calling (eg) printf without knowing how many arguments you're passing to it, unless you want to get into naughty and non-portable tricks.

The generally used solution is to always provide an alternate form of vararg functions, so printf has vprintf which takes a va_list in place of the .... The ... versions are just wrappers around the va_list versions.

Answer 2

Ross' solution cleaned-up a bit. Only works if all args are pointers. Also language implementation must support eliding of previous comma if __VA_ARGS__ is empty (both Visual Studio C++ and GCC do).

// pass number of arguments version
 #define callVardicMethodSafely(...) {value_t *args[] = {NULL, __VA_ARGS__}; _actualFunction(args+1,sizeof(args) / sizeof(*args) - 1);}


// NULL terminated array version
 #define callVardicMethodSafely(...) {value_t *args[] = {NULL, __VA_ARGS__, NULL}; _actualFunction(args+1);}

Answer 3

You can use inline assembly for the function call. (in this code I assume the arguments are characters).

void format_string(char *fmt, ...);
void debug_print(int dbg_level, int numOfArgs, char *fmt, ...)
    {
        va_list argumentsToPass;
        va_start(argumentsToPass, fmt);
        char *list = new char[numOfArgs];
        for(int n = 0; n < numOfArgs; n++)
            list[n] = va_arg(argumentsToPass, char);
        va_end(argumentsToPass);
        for(int n = numOfArgs - 1; n >= 0; n--)
        {
            char next;
            next = list[n];
            __asm push next;
        }
        __asm push fmt;
        __asm call format_string;
        fprintf(stdout, fmt);
    }

Answer 4

In magnificent C++0x you could use variadic templates:

template <typename ... Ts>
void format_string(char *fmt, Ts ... ts) {}

template <typename ... Ts>
void debug_print(int dbg_lvl, char *fmt, Ts ... ts)
{
  format_string(fmt, ts...);
}

Answer 5

Though you can solve passing the formatter by storing it in local buffer first, but that needs stack and can sometime be issue to deal with. I tried following and it seems to work fine.

#include <stdarg.h>
#include <stdio.h>

void print(char const* fmt, ...)
{
    va_list arg;
    va_start(arg, fmt);
    vprintf(fmt, arg);
    va_end(arg);
}

void printFormatted(char const* fmt, va_list arg)
{
    vprintf(fmt, arg);
}

void showLog(int mdl, char const* type, ...)
{
    print("\nMDL: %d, TYPE: %s", mdl, type);

    va_list arg;
    va_start(arg, type);
    char const* fmt = va_arg(arg, char const*);
    printFormatted(fmt, arg);
    va_end(arg);
}

int main() 
{
    int x = 3, y = 6;
    showLog(1, "INF, ", "Value = %d, %d Looks Good! %s", x, y, "Infact Awesome!!");
    showLog(1, "ERR");
}

Hope this helps.

Answer 6

To pass the ellipses on, you have to convert them to a va_list and use that va_list in your second function. Specifically;

void format_string(char *fmt,va_list argptr, char *formatted_string);


void debug_print(int dbg_lvl, char *fmt, ...) 
{    
 char formatted_string[MAX_FMT_SIZE];

 va_list argptr;
 va_start(argptr,fmt);
 format_string(fmt, argptr, formatted_string);
 va_end(argptr);
 fprintf(stdout, "%s",formatted_string);
}