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From: NN1@awiwuw11.wu-wien.ac.at
Newsgroups: comp.text.tex
Subject: uppercase
Message-ID: <90306.105506NN1@awiwuw11.wu-wien.ac.at>
Date: 2 Nov 90 21:38:04 GMT
Organization: Wirtschaftsuniversitaet Wien, Vienna, Austria
Lines: 39

Suppose I have the following code

\author{John Doe \address{Michigan State Univ.}
   \and Mike Deer \address{Ohio State Univ.}
   }

and suppose further, that the \author macro is called by another macro,
say, \doauthor.

The goal is to end up with only the names in uppercase letters, but the
expansion of \address (or anything else, for that matter) unaffected.

The simplistic approach for \doauthor, e.g.,
   \def\doauthor{\uppercase\expandafter{\author}} obviously will not
work, since the uppercase is a rather late operation and will apply to
anything in the expansion of \author.

Question 1: How to accomplish this?

This raises the following interesting aspect:

Question 2: How can one apply certain macro operations only to the
toplevel arguments?

For example, if my argument is {a b c \xxx{d e f} g}, only a, b, c, and
g should be affected.

In futilely trying to solve question 1, I also attempted to split the
argument to author into pieces that are top level elements, and pieces
that are csnames or arguments (i.e., within braces). This raises

Question 3: How can on split a piece of text into words? How can one
split a piece of text into logical units (say into: text, csnames,
brace-delimited things).

Thanks, thw.

Thomas Weigert, RISC-Linz, Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria.
email: k316670@aearn.bitnet, weigert@mcs.anl.gov