Many scanners need to search for included files or dependencies
using a path variable; this is how $CPPPATH
and
$LIBPATH
work. The path to search is passed to your
scanner as the path
argument. Path variables
may be lists of nodes, semicolon-separated strings, or even
contain SCons variables which need to be expanded. Fortunately,
SCons provides the FindPathDirs
function which itself returns
a function to expand a given path (given as a SCons construction
variable name) to a list of paths at the time the scanner is
called. Deferring evaluation until that point allows, for
instance, the path to contain $TARGET references which differ for
each file scanned.
Using FindPathDirs
is quite easy. Continuing the above example,
using KPATH as the construction variable with the search path
(analogous to $CPPPATH
), we just modify the Scanner
constructor call to include a path keyword arg:
kscan = Scanner(function = kfile_scan, skeys = ['.k'], path_function = FindPathDirs('KPATH'))
FindPathDirs returns a callable object that, when called, will essentially expand the elements in env['KPATH'] and tell the scanner to search in those dirs. It will also properly add related repository and variant dirs to the search list. As a side note, the returned method stores the path in an efficient way so lookups are fast even when variable substitutions may be needed. This is important since many files get scanned in a typical build.