C Preprocessor - Phases

Phases

Preprocessing is defined by the first four (of eight) phases of translation specified in the C Standard.

  1. Trigraph replacement: The preprocessor replaces trigraph sequences with the characters they represent.
  2. Line splicing: Physical source lines that are continued with escaped newline sequences are spliced to form logical lines.
  3. Tokenization: The preprocessor breaks the result into preprocessing tokens and whitespace. It replaces comments with whitespace.
  4. Macro expansion and directive handling: Preprocessing directive lines, including file inclusion and conditional compilation, are executed. The preprocessor simultaneously expands macros and, in the 1999 version of the C standard, handles _Pragma operators.

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