Determining the number of arguments in a C vararg macro

C vararg macros are very useful and I've generally used them a lot for wrapping C vararg functions.  However, at times it would be very useful to be able to determine the number of arguments being passed into the the vararg macro and this is not as straight forward as it first seems.

Anyhow, this problem has been asked many times on the usenet and internet, and I stumbled on a very creative solution by Laurent Deniau posted on comp.std.c back in 2006.

 #define PP_NARG(...) \  
      PP_NARG_(__VA_ARGS__,PP_RSEQ_N())  
 #define PP_NARG_(...) \  
      PP_ARG_N(__VA_ARGS__)  
 #define PP_ARG_N( \  
      _1, _2, _3, _4, _5, _6, _7, _8, _9,_10, \  
      _11,_12,_13,_14,_15,_16,_17,_18,_19,_20, \  
      _21,_22,_23,_24,_25,_26,_27,_28,_29,_30, \  
      _31,_32,_33,_34,_35,_36,_37,_38,_39,_40, \  
      _41,_42,_43,_44,_45,_46,_47,_48,_49,_50, \  
      _51,_52,_53,_54,_55,_56,_57,_58,_59,_60, \  
      _61,_62,_63,N,...) N  
 #define PP_RSEQ_N() \  
      63,62,61,60,          \  
      59,58,57,56,55,54,53,52,51,50, \  
      49,48,47,46,45,44,43,42,41,40, \  
      39,38,37,36,35,34,33,32,31,30, \  
      29,28,27,26,25,24,23,22,21,20, \  
      19,18,17,16,15,14,13,12,11,10, \  
      9,8,7,6,5,4,3,2,1,0  
   
 /* Some test cases */  
 PP_NARG(A) -> 1  
 PP_NARG(A,B) -> 2  
 PP_NARG(A,B,C) -> 3  
 PP_NARG(A,B,C,D) -> 4  
 PP_NARG(A,B,C,D,E) -> 5   

However, passing no arguments to this macro yields 1, which is not as we expect. So last night I tweaked the macro to fix this problem by checking the length of the stringified macro arguments and adjusting the return value for a empty __VA_ARGS__  - as follows:

 #define PP_NARG(...)  (PP_NARG_(__VA_ARGS__,PP_RSEQ_N()) - \  
     (sizeof(#__VA_ARGS__) == 1))  
 #define PP_NARG_(...)  PP_ARG_N(__VA_ARGS__)  
   
 #define PP_ARG_N( \  
    _1, _2, _3, _4, _5, _6, _7, _8, _9,_10, \  
   _11,_12,_13,_14,_15,_16,_17,_18,_19,_20, \  
   _21,_22,_23,_24,_25,_26,_27,_28,_29,_30, \  
   _31,_32,_33,_34,_35,_36,_37,_38,_39,_40, \  
   _41,_42,_43,_44,_45,_46,_47,_48,_49,_50, \  
   _51,_52,_53,_54,_55,_56,_57,_58,_59,_60, \  
   _61,_62,_63, N, ...) N  
   
 #define PP_RSEQ_N() \  
     63,62,61,60,          \  
     59,58,57,56,55,54,53,52,51,50, \  
     49,48,47,46,45,44,43,42,41,40, \  
     39,38,37,36,35,34,33,32,31,30, \  
     29,28,27,26,25,24,23,22,21,20, \  
     19,18,17,16,15,14,13,12,11,10, \  
     9,8,7,6,5,4,3,2,1,0  

The purists may point out that PP_NARG() only handles 64 arguments.  For just integer arguments, a better solution for any number of arguments has been proposed by user qrdl on stackoverflow:

 #define NUMARGS(...) (int)(sizeof((int[]){0, ##__VA_ARGS__})/sizeof(int)-1)

..which is appealing as it is more immediately understandable than the PP_NARG() macro, however it is less generic since it only works for ints.

Anyhow, it's great to find such novel solutions even if they may be at first a little bit non-intuitive.