General ⇒ Conditional IF with characters (INDEXING)

[NinV]

Hi,

sorry for bothering you, but I didn't succeed to find a solution in my guides and in this forum to my problem, which I didn't think so difficult!

I have to check if the first character of a string is "-" or not.

I wrote the following code

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\def\t{-}
\def\d{\estraiiniziale{#1}} % I put the first character in \d

\ifx\t\d
  ....
\else
  ....
\fi

but it doesn't work!

Can somebody help me?

Many thanks,
Nino

PS I need to make an index where all words beginning with a 'symbol' are sorted according to the following letter. Perhaps there is a simpler way to do that, but I failed to find it

[nlct]

You could define a command like:

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\newcommand*{\word}[1]{-#1\index{#1@-#1}}

then you can do \word{sample} which would display -sample in the text and index -sample but sort it without the - symbol. Alternatively, there are packages like datatool that can check for a given prefix.

Regards
Nicola Talbot

[NinV]

You could define a command like:

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\newcommand*{\word}[1]{-#1\index{#1@-#1}}

then you can do \word{sample} which would display -sample in the text and index -sample but sort it without the - symbol.

That's what I'm doing now. But I would like to have a command like:

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\newcommand*{\word}[1]{
%\if \word starts with a symbol (-)
-#1\index{#1@-#1}
%\else
#1\index{#1}
%\fi
}

Alternatively, there are packages like datatool that can check for a given prefix.

I've had a look to the package you suggest and I think that its command: \DTLifStartsWith can be what I'm looking for!

Thank you very much for your help.

Ciao,
Nino

[NinV]

Hi,

I'm trying to use datatool as suggested, but if I use the command

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\DTLsplitstring{-andika}{-}{\before}{\after}

directly in a text it works fine, but if I use it in a new command:

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\newcommand\term[1]{
\DTLsplitstring{#1}{-}{\before}{\after}
\ifx\after\#1
  #1\index{#1}
\else
  #1\index{\after@#1}
\fi
}

I get the following error message:

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!Undefined control sequence.
\DTLsplitstring #1#2#3#4-> \def \dtl@splitstr
                                             ##1#2##2\@nil {\de #3{##1}\def...

Can you help to understand what's happening?

Thanks a lot,
Nino

[nlct]

I don't get an error with the latest version (2.0) but your code has a couple of problems:

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\ifx\after\#1

This is comparing \after with \# and if true prints a "1".

If the symbol isn't present \after is empty and \before contains the original string, so you need to compare \before instead:

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\newcommand\term[1]{%
\def\Term{#1}%
\DTLsplitstring{#1}{-}{\before}{\after}
\ifx\before\Term
  #1\index{#1}
\else
  #1\index{\after @#1}
\fi
}

Hope that helps.

Regards
Nicola Talbot

[NinV]

Hi Nicola,

sorry for bothering you but even correcting the code as suggested it does work for me

I post a simplified version of my code, even so it does work!

I have three files. The main one is the following:

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\documentclass[11pt,twoside,a4paper]{book}
\usepackage[latin1]{inputenc}
\usepackage[esperanto, italian]{babel}
\usepackage{datatool}
\usepackage{fancyhdr}
\pagestyle{fancy}

\input{preambolo/talbndx}

\includeonly{%
capitoli/talbot01
}

\begin{document}

\pagestyle{fancy}
\include{capitoli/talbot01}
\end{document}

It calls some parts for the preamble, i.e. the redifinition of index commands:

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%
% index
%
\newcommand\term[1]{
\def\Term{#1}%
\DTLsplitstring{#1}{-}{\prima}{\dopo}%
\ifx\prima\Term % senza trattino
#1\index{#1}
\else % con trattino
#1\index{\dopo @#1}
\fi
}

and the text chapters:

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%********** Capitolo 1 **********
\setcounter{chapter}{1}
\setcounter{section}{0}
\chapter{Somo la kwanza}

\section{Maelezo (\textit{Spiegazioni})}

\subsection{\term{Forme di saluto} (I)}

Il saluto più usato (soprattutto con europei)

If I compile the main file I get the said error!

Would you like to try?

Thank you very much for your help.

Nino

[NinV]

Hi,

I think that the problem is \subsection{}, because I changed

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\subsection{\term{Forme di saluto} (I)}
Il saluto più usato (soprattutto con europei)

in

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\subsection{Forme di saluto (I)}
Il \term{saluto} più usato (soprattutto con europei)
Il \term{-saluto} più usato (soprattutto con europei)

and the code works well... but I need to use it everywhere

Another problem is that \DTLsplitstring{} doesn't ignore commands like \textit, so I can't use it this way:

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\term{\textit{saluto}}

Any hint?

Thanks a lot.

Nino

[nlct]

\subsection (and all the other sectioning commands) has a moving argument so you either need to protect \term (using \protect\term) or you need to make \term robust (define it using \DeclareRobustCommand instead of \newcommand) or you need to use the optional argument:

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\subsection[Forme di saluto (I)]{\term{Forme di saluto} (I)}

For terms that need to have a font change, you could set the font change as an optional argument, for example:

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\DeclareRobustCommand\term[2][]{%
\def\Term{#2}%
\DTLsplitstring{#2}{-}{\before}{\after}
\ifx\before\Term
  #1{#2}\index{#2}
\else
  #1{#2}\index{\after @#2}
\fi
}

then you can do, e.g.

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\term[\textit]{word}

Hope that helps.

Regards
Nicola Talbot

[NinV]

It works!

Thanks a lot for your kindness.

I'm a beginner and I find the LaTeX guides, which I'm studying hard, very unfriendly!

I knew very little about \DeclareRobustCommand

Thank you very much,
Nino