[tex-hyphen] How to output a character whose catcode is active?

[Mojca Miklavec]

Dear TeX magicians,

I have hit a tiny problem with UTF-8->encoding auto-conversion TeX macros.

Here's the minimal example from Georgian:

\catcode"E1=\active
\def^^e1#1#2{%
	\ifx#2^^ad{}problem: ^^e1 (E1)\else% ჭ - U+10ED - uni10ED
	\errmessage{Hyphenation pattern file corrupted or t8m encoding not supported!}
\fi}

ჭ - U+10ED

\bye


The problem is that I'm unable to "send 0xE1 to TeX without " since E1
is already active. I tried
    \ifx#2^^ad\bgroup\catcode"E1=11^^e1\egroup\else
but it doesn't seem to help. Most probably ^^e1 gets interpreted and
calls a macro before catcode has a chance to fix the code.

I would be very grateful for a solution to this puzzle. (But if there
is no easy way, that's also fine, as one can just as well load
patterns that are now being used just for pTeX.)

Thank you,
    Mojca