Using ctags or equivalent to browse code generated by stringification or other C macro tricks

Question

I am working on a very large project which uses the usually not so elegant but useful C macro stringification tricks to generate dynamic symbol names such as:

#define FUNCTION_NAME(signal) (void Callback_ ## signal ## (void))

I use ctags with vim, or visual studio code or eclipse. But there seems to be no way to be able to browse names generated during the preprocessing stage, and i understand why. But as large as the project is, is there a way to plug ctags into the build process so that it can build an index while the build happens. Or any other way of getting around this problem.

Answer 1

Universal Ctags has the ability to expand macro defined in the command line. -D option can be used for this purpose.

$ cat -n /tmp/input.c
     1  FUNCTION_NAME(term)
     2  {
     3    /* Do something */
     4  }
     5  
     6  FUNCTION_NAME(hup)
     7  {
     8    /* Do something */
     9  }
    10  
    11  
$ ~/bin/ctags -D 'FUNCTION_NAME(signal)=void  Callback_ ## signal ## (void)' -o - /tmp/input.c
Callback_hup    /tmp/input.c    /^FUNCTION_NAME(hup)$/;"    f   typeref:typename:void
Callback_term   /tmp/input.c    /^FUNCTION_NAME(term)$/;"   f   typeref:typename:void

See also https://docs.ctags.io/en/latest/man/ctags.1.html#language-specific-options