14.7. The _Pragma OperatorYou cannot construct a #pragma directive (or any other preprocessor directive) by means of a macro expansion. For cases where you would want to do that, C99 has also introduced the preprocessor operator _Pragma, which you can use with macros. Its syntax is as follows: _Pragma ( string_literal ) Here is how the _Pragma operator works. First, the string_literal operand is "de-stringized," or converted into a sequence of preprocessor tokens, in this way: the quotation marks enclosing the string are removed; each sequence of a backslash followed by a double quotation mark (\") is replaced by a quotation mark alone ("); and each sequence of two backslash characters (\\) is replaced with a single backslash (\). Then the preprocessor interprets the resulting sequence of tokens as if it were the text of a #pragma directive. The following line defines a helper macro, STR, which you can use to rewrite any #pragma directive using the _Pragma operator: #define STR(s) #s // This # is the "stringify" operator. With this definition, the following two lines are equivalent: #pragma tokens _Pragma ( STR(tokens) ) The following example uses the _Pragma operator in a macro: #define ALIGNMENT(n) _Pragma( STR(pack(n)) ) ALIGNMENT(2) Macro replacement changes the ALIGNMENT(2) macro call to the following: _Pragma( "pack(2)" ) The preprocessor then processes the line as it would the following directive: #pragma pack(2) |