[texhax] Composing two commands one inside another

[Philip TAYLOR]

Rodolfo Medina wrote:

> Hi, all.
> 
> In plain TeX, I want to compose to commands together, one inside another.
> I say, e.g.,
> \edef\a#1,#2{#1} 

That will simply void #2

> and
 > \edef\b#1{#1,dog};

> then I want to define \c#1,#2 so that the value of \a is collected from \b:
> I tried with
> \edef\c#1,#2{\b{\a#1,#2}}, but it didn't work.
> 
> Please anyone who can help?
> (Sorry for my ignorance!)

I'm sure you're not ignorant, but your explanation is distincly unclear!
However, let's work backwards :

 > so that \c{cat,mouse} should give the result 'cat,dog'.

i.e.,

	\def \c #1, #2{#1,<something>}

where we don't yet know how <something> becomes instantiated to "dog".

Can you explain this part ?

For what it's worth (and not knowing what exactly you're setting out
to achieve) you /may/ need to look at \expandafter : in your example
above :

 > \edef\c#1,#2{\b{\a#1,#2}}, but it didn't work.

there is every chance that you need to force a to be expanded before b,
in which case you would need something like :

	\edef \c #1,#2{ \expandafter  \expandafter  \expandafter \b \expandafter {\a #1,#2}}

Philip Taylor