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

[Mojca Miklavec]

Hello,

it seems that Hans' solution to use \detokenize{^^e1} works, but I
need some further testing (and possibly some further reading to at
least understand what it does).

To Arthur: if it was completely impossible to do it, then
inputenc/fontenc packages would have no chance to work at all, so
there must be a solution, but I totally agree that it could take me
many sleepless nights to figure out *how* to do it on my own, if I
would figure it out at all.

Mojca

On Fri, Mar 1, 2013 at 10:22 AM, Mojca Miklavec wrote:
> 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