Print the counter given as an argument

Question

I have a counterA and a counterB. I want to define a command \PrintCounter, which gets either A or B as argument, and then prints the value of the corresponding counter.

I wrote the following code:

\newcommand{\PrintCounter}[1]{
    \thecounter#1
}

which results in an error. I need a way to tell LaTeX to evaluate counter#1 before evaluating \the. Unfortunately, I couldn't make it work using \expandafter.

Answer 1

If \counterA and \counterB are \count registers, i.e. TeX counters, then you can use \csname ..\endcsname together with \expandafter:

\newcommand{\PrintCounter}[1]{%
    \expandafter\the\csname counter#1\endcsname
}

If they are however defined using \newcounter, i.e. LaTeX counters, then simply use \arabic{counter#1}.