&SCons; has built-in scanners that know how to look in C, Fortran and IDL source files for information about other files that targets built from those files depend on--for example, in the case of files that use the C preprocessor, the .h files that are specified using #include lines in the source. You can use the same mechanisms that &SCons; uses to create its built-in scanners to write scanners of your own for file types that &SCons; does not know how to scan "out of the box."

Suppose, for example, that we want to create a simple scanner for .foo files. A .foo file contains some text that will be processed, and can include other files on lines that begin with include followed by a file name: include filename.foo Scanning a file will be handled by a Python function that you must supply. Here is a function that will use the Python re module to scan for the include lines in our example: import re include_re = re.compile(r'^include\\s+(\\S+)$', re.M) def kfile_scan(node, env, path, arg): contents = node.get_contents() return include_re.findall(contents) The scanner function must accept the four specified arguments and return a list of implicit dependencies. Presumably, these would be dependencies found from examining the contents of the file, although the function can perform any manipulation at all to generate the list of dependencies. node An &SCons; node object representing the file being scanned. The path name to the file can be used by converting the node to a string using the str() function, or an internal &SCons; get_contents() object method can be used to fetch the contents. env The construction environment in effect for this scan. The scanner function may choose to use construction variables from this environment to affect its behavior. path A list of directories that form the search path for included files for this scanner. This is how &SCons; handles the &cv-link-CPPPATH; and &cv-link-LIBPATH; variables. arg An optional argument that you can choose to have passed to this scanner function by various scanner instances. A Scanner object is created using the &Scanner; function, which typically takes an skeys argument to associate the type of file suffix with this scanner. The Scanner object must then be associated with the &cv-link-SCANNERS; construction variable of a construction environment, typically by using the &Append; method: kscan = Scanner(function = kfile_scan, skeys = ['.k']) env.Append(SCANNERS = kscan) When we put it all together, it looks like: import re include_re = re.compile(r'^include\\s+(\\S+)$', re.M) def kfile_scan(node, env, path): contents = node.get_contents() includes = include_re.findall(contents) return includes kscan = Scanner(function = kfile_scan, skeys = ['.k']) env = Environment(ENV = {'PATH' : '/usr/local/bin'}) env.Append(SCANNERS = kscan) env.Command('foo', 'foo.k', 'kprocess < $SOURCES > $TARGET')