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From: dhosek@sif.claremont.edu (Hosek, Donald A.)
Newsgroups: comp.text.tex
Subject: Re: defining active characters by number
Keywords: active characters
Message-ID: <8083@jarthur.Claremont.EDU>
Date: 10 Aug 90 23:36:54 GMT
Sender: news@jarthur.Claremont.EDU
Reply-To: dhosek@sif.claremont.edu
Followup-To: comp.text.tex
Organization: Harvey Mudd College
Lines: 47

In article <157@skye.cs.ed.ac.uk>, ajcd@cs.ed.ac.uk (Angus Duggan) writes...

>I'm flummoxed. I've searched through the TeXbook for an answer to this
>problem, and tried everything I can think of, but I can't find an answer. I
>want to make a character active, and define a macro for it, with only the
>number of the character specified (in a count register).

>What I'm trying to do is to set up a lot of the character codes from 128--255
>to call a common macro, with the number of the character code as a parameter.
>I'd prefer to have a loop, something like:

>\bgroup % localise \count0
>  \count0=161
>  \loop
>    \expandafter\global\expandafter\catcode\count0=\active
>    % \edef active character number \count0 to expand to:
>    % {\noexpand\macro{\the\count0}}
>    \advance\count0 by 1
>  \ifnum\count0<255\repeat
>\egroup

>The only way I can see of doing this is writing out an auxiliary file, and
>re-reading it. Somebody please show me that I'm wrong.

The following ought to work.

\uccode`\~=\count0
\uppercase{\catcode`\~=\active
   \xdef~{\noexpand\macro{\the\count0}}}

I haven't tried it though so I'd appreciate it if someone could
let me know how close I've come.

-dh







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