What is "stringImportPaths"

[Atila Neves]

On Wednesday, 6 December 2017 at 19:05:24 UTC, mrphobby wrote:
> Can anyone explain what "stringImportPaths" is? I have seen 
> this being used in dub.json files and I think I kind of know 
> what it does, but I haven't been able to find a clear 
> explanation in any documentation of what it does. It does not 
> look like anything I'm familiar with from other languages.
>
> I understand it can be used for resources but I have seen it 
> being used with both text files and binary files so I'm a bit 
> confused. The documentation says I can import "whatever", but 
> that feels a bit weird since importing is a construct used for 
> importing symbols, right?

stringImportPaths are to -J what importPaths are to -I. In D you 
can import a string directly into your program, similarly to 
#include in C and C++. Imagine it as kind of a 
mixin(read("filename")) (which you can't do). For security 
concerns, dmd only looks for "filename" in directories passed in 
with -J.


A silly example:

foo.d:
import std.stdio;
void main() {
         mixin(`auto values = [` ~ import("foo.txt") ~ `];`);
         writeln(values);
}


foo.txt:
1, 2, 3, 4, 5

$ dmd -J. foo.d
$ ./foo
[1, 2, 3, 4, 5]


Atila