Use value from C/C++ macro in CMake - cmake

Question

What is the easiest way to get the value of a C/C++ macro into a CMake variable?
Given I check for a library libfoo with the header foo.h. I know foo.h contains the macro #define FOO_VERSION_MAJOR <version> where version is an integer or string value. To extract the major version of the found library, I want to use the value from this macro.
As a bonus, if the macro is not found, this could indicate a version older then a specific version introducing the version macro.

Answer 1

I'd go with file(READ ...) to read the header followed by string(REGEX ...) to extract desired define.
Example code:
file(READ "foo.h" header)
string(REGEX MATCH "#define FOO_MAJOR_VERSION [0-9]+" macrodef "${header}")
string(REGEX MATCH "[0-9]+" FooMajorVersion "${macrodef}")

Answer 2

With try_compile and the right pragma it is possible to output the value of a pre-processor macro during compile time. CMake can parse the output to get the desired value.
CMake snippet:
try_compile(result "${CMAKE_BINARY_DIR}"
SOURCES "${CMAKE_SOURCE_DIR}/foo-version.cpp"
OUTPUT_VARIABLE fooversion)
string(REGEX MATCH ": [0-9]+" fooversionshort "${fooversion}")
string(REGEX MATCH "[0-9]+" FooMajorVersion "${fooversionshort}")
foo-version.cpp:
#include "foo.h"
/* definition to expand macro then apply to pragma message */
#define VALUE_TO_STRING(x) #x
#define VALUE(x) VALUE_TO_STRING(x)
#pragma message(VALUE(FOO_MAJOR_VERSION))
int main()
{
return 0;
}
Good:
Actual value from the variable, which might be calculated.
Bad:
Output of macros is only support by some newer compilers.
Parsing of output might break for untested compilers, as the format changes from compiler version to compiler version.
Kind of complicated code, verbose code which is difficult to read.

Answer 3

The macro expansion can be extracted by using the C preprocessor.
I used this method to extract specific typedef's without needing to know the exact location of the define in the file hierarchy.
Let say that we have this macro defined somewhere in foo.h
#define FOO_VERSION_MAJOR 666
You need to create a helper file helper.c with this content
#include "foo.h"
int __READ_FOO_MAJOR__ = FOO_VERSION_MAJOR ;
Note that I used a specific pattern __READ_FOO_MAJOR__ that I will use later as the pattern for a grep command
And from CMakeLists.txt you have to call the C (C++, etc..) preprocessor and filter its output like this
cmake_minimum_required(VERSION 3.0)
execute_process(
COMMAND bash "-c" "${CMAKE_C_COMPILER} -E ${CMAKE_CURRENT_SOURCE_DIR}/helper.cpp | grep __READ_FOO_MAJOR__ | awk '{ print $4}'"
OUTPUT_VARIABLE FOO_VERSION_MAJOR )
message("From CMake: FOO_VERSION_MAJOR=${FOO_VERSION_MAJOR}")
Note that awk '{ print $4}' extract the 4th word on the selected line.
When running cmake we get this result
From CMake: FOO_VERSION_MAJOR=666
The short shel pipeline used is built with Unix system V base commands and should run everywhere.