cmake generate error on windows as it uses \ as escape seq

Question

I have something such as this in my cmake:

set(MyLib_SRC $ENV{MyLib_DIR}/MyLib.cpp)
add_library(MyLibrary STATIC ${MyLib_SRC})

but when I r

Answer 1

I suppose cmake always expects UNIX-style path. So, what I do is

set(MayLib_PATH $ENV{MyLib_DIR})
string(REPLACE "\\" "/" MayLib_PATH "${MayLib_PATH}")

Answer 2

The problem is that $ENV{MyLib_DIR} expands the environment variable verbatim, including the backslashes used as path separators. These can then get re-interpreted as escape sequences.

What you want to do is convert the path to CMake's internal format before handling it in CMake code:

file(TO_CMAKE_PATH $ENV{MyLib_DIR} MyLib_DIR)

set(MyLib_SRC ${MyLib_DIR}/MyLib.cpp)
add_library(MyLibrary STATIC ${MyLib_SRC})