[texhax] Low-level TeX question: string substitution macro

[Michael Doob]

On Tuesday 29 May 2007 8:38 am, Toby Cubitt wrote:
> I'm trying to write an internal macro that does string substitution, in
> order to escape certain characters in the string before writing it to a
> file. (The package is supposed to be writing a sed script, so I need to
> escape characters that have a special meaning in regular expressions.)
>

Can't sed do this itself? I'm almost afraid to mention this, but
perl has a builtin function called quotemeta which does exactly what you
want. Please, please, please, no language wars. It's just a possible
option for Tony.

Cheers,
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Michael Doob                    Telephone: (204) 474-9796
Department of Mathematics       Fax: (204) 474-7606
University of Manitoba          email: Michael_Doob at umanitoba.ca
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