Aditya, Peter, as always, thanks a lot for your help. Peter, you're certainly right that it's difficult to diagnose my problem - I'm sending only snippets, no example. But it's a fairly complex thing here for my presentation module and difficult to reduce in size. On Sep 3, 2008, at 6:58 PM, Aditya Mahajan wrote:
On Wed, 3 Sep 2008, Thomas A. Schmitz wrote:
Hi all,
I'm trying to define a macro \Command which can either have four or five arguments. If it has five, I want to define them as
\Command1[#1][#2][#3][#4]{#5}
if it has four, as
\Command2[#1][#2][#3]{4#}
I thought this would be the way to go:
\def\Command{% \doquadrupleempty\doCommand}
You need something with possibly five arguments so you should use quint rather than quad:
\def\Command% {\doquintupleargument\doCommand}
\def\doCommand{% \iffifthargument% \doquadrupleargument\Command1% \else% \dotripleargument\Command2% \fi}
The usual way is
\def\doCommand[#1][#2][#3][#4][#5]% {\doifelsenothing{#5}%See below {\Command1[#1][#2][#3][#4][#5]} {\Command2[#1][#2][#3][#4]}}
I use \doifelsenothing rather than \doiffirthargument. If I give
\Command[...][...][...][...][] with \doifelsenothing \Commnad2 will be called while with \iffifthargument \Command1 will be called. Use whichever is more appropriate for your problem.
OK, that does make sense, but now I also see where my problem lies. When I define \doCommand[#1][#2][#3][#4]#5 and then have \Command2[#1][#2][#3]#4 TeX picks up a closing bracket as #4. I suspect that my problem lies in the definition \doCommand[#1][#2][#3][#4]#5 . The two definitions don't match; when I look at \doCommand, the closing bracket is indeed argument #4, from TeX's point of view. Maybe I need to reverse the order of my arguments and make it \doCommand#1[#2][#3][#4][#5] ? but I'm not sure if this would play with quintupleempty... Anyway, thanks a lot for your help. I'll look further into it and will maybe come back with a real example later if I can't figure it out. Thomas