Question

This should be possible, but as I am a novice with m4, I’m not sure how to go about it, or how to write an algorithm to do so (in m4).

edit:

Just solved it, anyway for future reference, I have a series of characters, they need to be translated to their equivalent ASCII code points, e.g.

ascii(-{COLON}-, -{:}-) => #define TKN_COLON 58

Answer 1

I accomplished this with the following code section

divert(-1)
changequote(-{,}-)
changecom(/*,*/)
define(-{ascii}-,-{#define TKN_-{}-$1 esyscmd(-{python -c "import sys; sys.stdout.write('%d'%ord('$2'))"}-)}-)
divert(0)dnl

I would greatly appreciate if anyone knows of a better way to do this (e.g. native m4, or more portable shell command).