[pdftex] translating data to macros

[E R]

Hi,

I have a problem which can be described as a "mail merge" application.
That is, I have data in an external file, and I need an algorithm to
create TeX macros which will faithfully represent that data in a LaTeX
document. For instance, my data may have characters which TeX normally
interprets in a special way (dollar signs, less-than, greater-than,
etc), and I need to disable any special interpretation. The algorithm
does not have to be in TeX - I'm envisioning a perl script to
translate the data to the appropriate TeX macros.

Is there a robust way to create a macro definition which, when
expanded, will print a specific character devoid of any special
interpretation by TeX?

(I figure if I can do it for just one character I can figure out how
to do it for an entire string.)

Note that my data will contain non-ASCII characters such as characters
in the Latin1 and Cyrillic code-point space.

Thanks,

ER