C11 _Generic: how to deal with string literals?

Here is a solution:

#include <stdio.h>
#define foo(x) _Generic((0,x), char*: puts(x))

int main()
{
    foo("Hello, world!");
    return 0;
}

This compiles and produces:

$ clang t.c && ./a.out 
Hello, world!

It is somewhat lame, but I did not find any better way to make x decay to a pointer to char nor to match its type in the fuzzy fashion that you require, with Apple LLVM version 4.2 (clang-425.0.28) (based on LLVM 3.2svn).

According to this blog post by Jens Gustedt, GCC's behavior is different (in GCC, strings automatically decay to pointer in a _Generic context, apparently).

By the way, in C, the type of a string literal is array of char, not of const char. Rejecting char [] as type-name in a generic-association is not a compiler bug:

A generic selection shall have no more than one default generic association. The type name in a generic association shall specify a complete object type other than a variably modified type. (6.5.1.1:2 with my emphasis)

I have figured out a way to avoid using the clever (0,x) trick.

If you use a string literal the type is char[s] , where s is the size of the string literal.

How do you get that size?, use sizeof operator:

#include <stdio.h>

#define Test( x )   _Generic( ( x ) ,   char*: puts ,                   \
                                        const char*: puts ,             \
                                        const char[sizeof( x )]: puts , \
                                        char[sizeof( x )]: puts )( x )

int main(void) 
{

    char str[] = "This" ;
    Test( str ) ;

    Test( "works" ) ;

    char str2[10] = "!!!" ;
    Test( str2 ) ;

return 0;
}

I tried compiling it with clang and Pelles and it worked.

The only problem you still have to cast variable length arrays.

After trying some more I found another analogue way of doing what Pascal Cuoq did, use &* operators:

#include <stdio.h>
#define foo(x) _Generic( ( &*(x) ), char*: puts , const char*: puts )( x )

int main()
{
    foo("Hello, world!");
    return 0;
}