[texhax] The last character of a string

[Reinhard Kotucha]

On 29 January 2010 Donald Arseneau wrote:

 > Michael Barr <barr at math.mcgill.ca> writes:
 > 
 > > Is there a simple way to find the last character of a string?  
 > 
 > You have to scan through the tokens from first to last.

This sounds difficult at a first glance, but fortunately the LaTeX
kernel provides a macro (\@tfor, defined in ltcntrl.dtx) which might
be useful here.

Here an example file...

\documentclass{article}
\makeatletter
\@tfor\token := abcd \do {\edef\lasttoken{\token}}
\show\lasttoken
\stop

...and the result:

> \lasttoken=macro:
->d.
l.4 \show\lasttoken

If the token list is a macro, it has to be expanded in advance:

\def\list{abcd}

\expandafter\@tfor\expandafter\token\expandafter
  :\expandafter=\list \do {\edef\lasttoken{\token}}

This could be a starting point.  It saves a lot of work, at least.  

 > > What I want to do is add a period unless the string already 
 > > ends in a period, question mark, or exclamation mark, 
 > 
 > Oh that's easy -- check the value of \spacefactor.
 > Easy, but not 100% reliable.

Problematic with \frenchspacing where \spacefactor is always 1000.  
Maybe one should put \let\frenchspacing\relax into the preamble if the
document contains contributions from many authors.

BTW, another option is to pre-process the files using a scripting
language like Perl, Python, or Lua.  Many problems can be solved
easier this way.  Suppose you have a solution already for determining
the last token in a macro.  Now you want to remove spaces in front of
exclamation/questionmarks too.  It's very easy to solve these
problems with regular expressions.  This is one of the reasons I'm
so much interested in LuaTeX.

Regards,
  Reinhard

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