john.levon(a)sun.com wrote: This looks fine. Thanks! However, to prevent overzealous developers from accidentally applying NULLSTR to a non-char*, how about using an inline function instead? e.g., static inline const char *nullstr(const char *s) { return s ? s : "(null)"; } Then if I accidentally use "nullstr(some_int_var)", the compiler will catch it, rather than masking the real error at run time. Some macro abuses would result in warnings, but at least NULLSTR(0) would mistakenly hide a real error. Whoops. the static inline function also masks the problem with a literal "0". A little experimentation shows that using something like this does most of what I want: #define NULLSTR(s) \ ((void)verify_true(sizeof *(s) == sizeof (char)), \ (s) ? (s) : "(null)") That verify_true use ensures (at compile time) that "s" is a pointer to something "char"-sized. verify_true is defined in gnulib's #include <verify.h>, which is already used by libvirt. Then, even NULLSTR(0) is diagnosed at compile time. For the record, note that this usage does *not* trigger a failure: char i[10] = "abcdef"; printf ("%s", NULLSTR(i)); However, gcc -Wall does print a warning: warning: the address of 'i' will always evaluate as 'true' but that's moot, because there's no reason ever to use NULLSTR on such a variable.