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up vote 11 down vote favorite

Is there a way to find the previously printed character in LaTeX? E.g:

\newcommand{\th}{%
  \ifthenelse%
    {\equal{\previouscharacter}{1}}%
    {st}%
    {th}%
}

4\th and 21\th % would like to yield "4thand 21st"
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4  
Nice question! Nevertheless, this answer may be of interest to you. – lockstep Mar 13 '11 at 17:26
@lockstep: Actually, I just read that question and thought: wouldn't n\th look better than \nth{n}? – Tim N Mar 13 '11 at 17:30
@Tim: n\th would gobble any space that follows in the text, so ... probably not. ;-) – lockstep Mar 13 '11 at 17:33
Ah well, with some minor modifications then. – Tim N Mar 13 '11 at 17:34
I'm not sure how this would work. TeX wouldn't know that it would need to remember the character before until after it has read it... – Seamus Mar 13 '11 at 18:05
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2 Answers

up vote 8 down vote accepted

The answer, unfortunately, is no. TeX contains a few primitives that modify things before them (\over, \atop, \above and the withdelims variants), but nothing general purpose.

In addition to the various packages which implement printing ordinal numbers, I wrote a fairly straightforward macro that does this here.

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I know nothing about \lastbox, but could it conceivably be used to do that? – Bruno Le Floch Mar 13 '11 at 23:21
@Bruno: alas, my experience as recorded in the following discussion suggests not: tex.stackexchange.com/questions/6183/…. – Ryan Reich Mar 14 '11 at 4:14
up vote 3 down vote

As to the specific application in question, there's the engord package. Examples:

\engordnumber{1} 
\engordnumber{12}
\engordnumber{123}

return 1st, 12th, and 123rd. For the specific question, I can't answer.

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