What is the correct way to signal the end a LaTeX command?

Question

I am writing a LaTeX export feature for my database. To this end, I am doing a symbol-by-symbol transformation of special characters in latin-1 text fields to LaTeX macros, such as _ to \_, ~ to \textasciitilde, and so end. When doing this, many macro commands need to be separated from text immediately following it, or I will end up with errors like "~user" being transformed to "\textasciitildeuser".

Using Google I came up with a number of different ways to achieve this separation, such as:

• putting a white space at the end of the macro, e.g. '\textasciitilde '
• putting an empty pair of brackets at the end, e.g. '\textasciitilde{}'
• putting the macro into brackets, e.g. '{\textasciitilde}'

What is the correct an intended way to separate a LaTeX macro command from the text immediately following it? For instance, the third way seems a little problematic to me since putting stuff in brackets may have additional effect, e.g. when the text is used as content of BibTeX fields.

Any advise is appreciated.

Answer 1

Use a space Especially in math mode both {\foo} and \foo{} will have an adverse effect on spacing, and as you comment surrounding the command may negate it altogether, for example {\small} does nothing as the font change is discarded at the }.