I found this regarding how the C preprocessor should handle string literal concatenation (phase 6). However, I can not find anything regarding how this is handled in C++ (does C++ use the C preprocessor?).
The reason I ask is that I have the following:
const char * Foo::encoding = "\0" "1234567890\0abcdefg";
where encoding is a static member of class Foo. Without the availability of concatenation I wouldnt be able to write that sequence of characters like that.
const char * Foo::encoding = "\01234567890\0abcdefg";
Is something entirely different due to the way \012 is interpreted.
I dont have access to multiple platforms and I’m curious how confident I should be that the above is always handled correctly – i.e. I will always get { 0, '1', '2', '3', ... }
The language (C as well as C++) has no “preprocessor”. “Preprocessor”, as a separate functional unit, is an implementation detail. The way the source file(s) is handled if defined by so called phases of translation. One of the phases in C, as well as in C++ involves concatenating string literals.
In C++ language standard it is described in 2.1. For C++ (C++03) it is phase 6