Evaluating conditional expression in flycheck syntax checker command

Question

I'd like the :command of a flycheck checker to depend on the file extension of the input.

For example:

• for .tex files run the command foo --format latex file.tex
• for any other file extension run the command foo --format text file.txt

I've tried:

:command ("foo" "--format" `(if (string= "tex" (file-name-extension source-inplace)) "latex" "text") source-inplace)

Which returns:

flycheck-define-command-checker: Invalid command argument (\‘ (if (string= "tex" (file-name-extension source-inplace)) "latex" "text")) in syntax checker textlint

Which is thrown from flycheck when executing flycheck-command-argument-p.

Is it possible to achieve what I'm attempting? i.e the command string passed to :command being determined by the file extension of the file being checked by flycheck?

For context, the solution was required for implementing a textlint flycheck checker: https://www.macs.hw.ac.uk/~rs46/posts/2018-12-29-textlint-flycheck.html

Answer 1

The solution is to use eval (credit: flycheck gitter):

:command ("foo" "--format"
    (eval (if (string= "tex" (file-name-extension buffer-file-name))
                "latex"
               "text"))
    source-inplace)