Is there a way to count with macros?

Question

I want to create a macro that prints \"Hello\" a specified number of times. It\'s used like:

many_greetings!(3);  // expands to three `println!(\"Hello\");`          


        

Answer 1

As the other answers already said: no, you can't count like this with declarative macros (macro_rules!).

---

But you can implement the many_greetings! example as a procedural macro. procedural macros were stabilized a while ago, so the definition works on stable. However, we can't yet expand macros into statements on stable -- that's what the #![feature(proc_macro_hygiene)] is for.

This looks like a lot of code, but most code is just error handling, so it's not that complicated!

examples/main.rs

#![feature(proc_macro_hygiene)]

use count_proc_macro::many_greetings;

fn main() {
    many_greetings!(3);
}

Cargo.toml

[package]
name = "count-proc-macro"
version = "0.1.0"
authors = ["me"]
edition = "2018"

[lib]
proc-macro = true

[dependencies]
quote = "0.6"

src/lib.rs

extern crate proc_macro;

use std::iter;
use proc_macro::{Span, TokenStream, TokenTree};
use quote::{quote, quote_spanned};


/// Expands into multiple `println!("Hello");` statements. E.g.
/// `many_greetings!(3);` will expand into three `println`s.
#[proc_macro]
pub fn many_greetings(input: TokenStream) -> TokenStream {
    let tokens = input.into_iter().collect::>();

    // Make sure at least one token is provided.
    if tokens.is_empty() {
        return err(Span::call_site(), "expected integer, found no input");
    }

    // Make sure we don't have too many tokens.
    if tokens.len() > 1 {
        return err(tokens[1].span(), "unexpected second token");
    }

    // Get the number from our token.
    let count = match &tokens[0] {
        TokenTree::Literal(lit) => {
            // Unfortunately, `Literal` doesn't have nice methods right now, so
            // the easiest way for us to get an integer out of it is to convert
            // it into string and parse it again.
            if let Ok(count) = lit.to_string().parse::() {
                count
            } else {
                let msg = format!("expected unsigned integer, found `{}`", lit);
                return err(lit.span(), msg);
            }
        }
        other => {
            let msg = format!("expected integer literal, found `{}`", other);
            return err(other.span(), msg);
        }
    };

    // Return multiple `println` statements.
    iter::repeat(quote! { println!("Hello"); })
        .map(TokenStream::from)
        .take(count)
        .collect()
}

/// Report an error with the given `span` and message.
fn err(span: Span, msg: impl Into) -> TokenStream {
    let msg = msg.into();
    quote_spanned!(span.into()=> {
        compile_error!(#msg);
    }).into()
}

Running cargo run --example main prints three "Hello"s.