How to best split long strings?

Question

I would like to do a simple \StrSplit (from the xstring package) on a string I have, however, the string in question may contain a \par, and it appears that \@xs@StrSpl@t@@, which I can only imagine is an internal xstring macro, is not a long macro, so it causes an error.

Are there any workarounds? Other packages with similar functionality that accept long strings? A way to remove \par temporarily and put it back later?

EDIT: I only actually need to split off the first character, so if there's a way to do that directly on arbitrary strings (with the semantics of \noexpand), that would work too.

Answer 1

You can try this to get the first character:

\documentclass{article}
\begin{document}

\makeatletter
\long\def\test#1{%
  \long\def\getfirstchar##1##2;{%
  \def\storeone{##1}
}
 \getfirstchar#1;
}
\makeatother


\test{This is \par something}

\storeone
\end{document}

The macro gets the first letter and stores it in another macro called storeone. I am not sure what you want to do exactly, other than get the first letter, perhaps you can expand on your question a bit. You can also have a look at source2e, there are similar commands such as \@firstoftwo.