While fiddling with character strings I found the \getfirstcharacter macro which is very handy. However, I am consuming a character string character by character. Although I have a macro for that, I think it is a good policy to stay as much as possible within the ConTexT framework when concocting macro's to be used under ConTeXt. Now for the question. \getfirstcharacter puts the first character in \firstcharacter. I looked for a macro containing the rest of the string but could not find one. Something like: \getfirstcharacter{abc} then \firstcharacter = a \lastcharacters = bc This will make it possible to process a string character by character, in the same way as \processcommalist does with comma separated strings. But possibly this is already somewhere in the code and I overlooked it. yours sincerely, dr. H. van der Meer