netlisting expressions

 The reason I need this is because we are writing a custom netlist procedure.

Following your suggestion I think I can use aelEngNotation and aelSignum because they both return NaN when they detect an expression.

Is there a more appropriate ael* function that I didn't notice?

Thanks.

 In fact, I'd also like to get rid of m='1*4', so that I get m=4.

 Is there a method to deal with this?

Basically, we just need to pass to hspice quoted expressions whose value  we cannot compute during netlisting.

Thanks.

The nlPrintInstParameters function does this already, but if you need to handle the printing in some special way, you'll need to handle that yourself. This function could be used:

procedure( abHandleHspiceMathExpr(exprValue)
    let( (found env compExpr result newValue)
        cond(
            (numberp(exprValue) exprValue)
            (blankstrp(exprValue) exprValue)
            (stringp(exprValue)
                (cond
                    ((newValue=aelEngNotation(exprValue))&&!isNaN(atof(newValue)) newValue)
                    (!(env = aelEnvCreate("os" t nil)) 
                        warn("An environment to evaluate an AEL expression %L cannot be created.\n" exprValue)
                    ) 
                    (!(compExpr = aelEnvCompile(env exprValue)) 
                        warn("The AEL expression %L cannot be compiled.\n" exprValue)
                    ) 
                    (!(result = aelEnvExecute(compExpr)) 
                        warn("The AEL expression %L cannot be executed.\n" exprValue) 
                        aelEnvFreeCompExpr(compExpr)
                    ) 
                    (t 
                        exprValue = result 
                        aelEnvFreeCompExpr(compExpr)
                    )
                )
                found = aelNumber(exprValue) || rexMatchp("^[a-zA-Z_]+[a-zA-Z0-9_\\.]*$" exprValue)
                unless(found 
                    sprintf(exprValue "%c%s%c" 
                        '\' exprValue 
                        '\'
                    )
                )
                exprValue
            )
        )
    )
)

Thanks! Your procedure works very well, it's much more complete and correct than mine:

;; check if the argument is an expression
(procedure
 (parseExpr expr)
 (if (equal (aelEngNotation expr) "NaN") then
   (strcat "'" expr "'")
   else
   (sprintf nil "%L" (evalstring expr))
   )
 )