Xamarin ios - import library - ios

Question

I need help importing a library to Xamarin. I included the library and inserted it into a new folder named BarcodeScanner, and the name of the library is libBarcodeScanner.a.
gcc_flags "-L${ProjectDir} -lBarcodeScanner -force_load ${ProjectDir}/libBarcodeScanner.a”
But it shows an error:
Error: Could not parse additional mtouch arguments: No matching quote found.
What should i do ?
Do i need to create a binding project to use a library like BarcodeScanner ?

Answer 1

Error: Could not parse additional mtouch arguments: No matching quote found.
That does not look like a Xamarin.iOS (mtouch) error message. Those start with a MT prefix followed by 4 numbers, e.g. MT2001. Could it be Xamarin Studio giving you this error ?
What should i do ?
Review the flags: are they identical to what's pasted above ?
No matching quote found. makes is sound there's an extra quote in there. Maybe one of the " is wrong (e.g. a autocorrection giving you a smart quote) ?
Or maybe your project directory (replaced from ${ProjectDir} contains a quote character ?
Also can you edit your question to add which version of Xamarin Studio you're using ?
Do i need to create a binding project to use a library like BarcodeScanner ?
No, but it's the preferred ways to link static libraries. Using a binding project removed the need to add Additional mtouch arguments inside every projects and every build configuration (e.g. Debug, Release...) of your applications.

Answer 2

I will answer my own question, maybe it will help someone. I declared in my MainController that i needed:
using MonoTouch.CoreVideo;
using MonoTouch.CoreMedia;
using MonoTouch.CoreGraphics;
using MonoTouch.CoreFoundation;
And after that i referenced only the static library with:
-gcc_flags "-L${ProjectDir} -lBarcodeScanner -force_load ${ProjectDir}/libBarcodeScanner.a"

Answer 3

#poupou's "maybe" was spot on, but I'll be pedantic and explain exactly.
Look closely at this line I just quoted from your original question. I've marked it down using code (four spaces prefix per line), and broke it into two lines. Nothing else has been changed. Hopefully the error should be obvious now:
- gcc_flags "-L${ProjectDir} -lBarcodeScanner
-force_load ${ProjectDir}/libBarcodeScanner.a”
Essentially, you used different types of double quotes. The first double-quote character above is Unicode 0x0022, which is the regular Quotation Mark. The second double-quote character above is Unicode 0x8221, or Right Double Quotation Mark. It might be that you had copied & pasted all or part of the line above from a web page, rather than typing it in.
For command-line processing, mixing your styles of double quotes simply won't work. You'll need to use balanced regular quotation marks, as you wrote in your own answer just now (but might not have specifically noticed?) FWIW, the right- and left- variants of the quotation mark are usually used for word processing, web pages, etc. where the style aesthetic matters.
Since you didn't use code-markup when quoting that line originally (while I noticed you did, in your recently posted answer) it looks like Stack Overflow "helpfully" tried to render the quotes as similar in style, fooling us into looking elsewhere for the problem, when it was right in front of us.
Anyway, next time you get an error about mismatched quotes, I suggest you carefully check their type. If they look the least bit different, they may not be the right kind of quotes.