(m4.info)Syntax

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3 Lexical and syntactic conventions
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As 'm4' reads its input, it separates it into "tokens".  A token is
either a name, a quoted string, or any single character, that is not a
part of either a name or a string.  Input to 'm4' can also contain
comments.  GNU 'm4' does not yet understand multibyte locales; all
operations are byte-oriented rather than character-oriented (although if
your locale uses a single byte encoding, such as ISO-8859-1, you will
not notice a difference).  However, 'm4' is eight-bit clean, so you can
use non-ASCII characters in quoted strings (Note: Changequote),
comments (Note: Changecom), and macro names (Note: Indir), with the
exception of the NUL character (the zero byte ''\0'').

Names

Macro names

Quoted strings

Quoting input to 'm4'

Comments

Comments in 'm4' input

Other tokens

Other kinds of input tokens

Input processing

How 'm4' copies input to output