Practical Programming in Tcl & Tk, Third Edition

Constructing Lists

Constructing a list can be tricky because you must maintain proper list syntax. In simple cases, you can do this by hand. In more complex cases, however, you should use Tcl commands that take care of quoting so that the syntax comes out right.

The list command

The list command constructs a list out of its arguments so that there is one list element for each argument. If any of the arguments contain special characters, the list command adds quoting to ensure that they are parsed as a single element of the resulting list. The automatic quoting is very useful, and the examples in this book use the list command frequently. The next example uses list to create a list with three values, two of which contain special characters.