Merge separate footnotes into text

Question

A text (written by someone else) has numbered footnote insertion points:

Text text1) text text text2) text text text.3) Text ... 

The actual footnote-texts are in a second file:

1) text of note one
2) text of note two
3) text of note three
...

Manually putting each note where it belongs would be a nuisance; using endnotes instead of footnotes is unfortunately not an option. Using \footnotemark[num] and \footnotetext[num] gives me the right numbering but not the right distribution over the pages.

I was wondering whether I could define one numbered macro per note (e.g. \newcommand{\sepfootnote1}{\footnote{text of note one}} and calling each macro at the appropriate point in the text but as macro names may not contain numbers this wouldn't be possible with a simple RegEx.

Is there another way to make LaTeX do the tedious work?

Answer 1

If doing text substitutions is not a problem, you can prepend \printfootnote to all expressions such as 1) or 2) in the text and \definefootnote in the footnote file; append also \endfootnote at the end of each footnote text. Then

\def\printfootnote#1){\footnote{\csname extfootnote#1\endcsname}}
\def\definefootnote#1) #2\endfootnote{%
  \expandafter\def\csname extfootnote#1\endcsname{#2}}
\input{footnotefile}

(where footnotefile.tex is the file containing the footnote text) should do the trick, at least if the footnote file is not extremely big.

Here is main.tex:

\documentclass[a4paper]{article}

\def\printfootnote#1){\footnote{\csname extfootnote#1\endcsname}}
\def\definefootnote#1) #2\endfootnote{%
  \expandafter\def\csname extfootnote#1\endcsname{#2}}
\input{footnotefile}

\begin{document}
Text text\printfootnote1) text text text\printfootnote2) text text text.\printfootnote3) Text
\end{document}

And here is footnotefile.tex:

\definefootnote1) First footnote\endfootnote
\definefootnote2) Second footnote\endfootnote
\definefootnote3) Third footnote\endfootnote

Note: use \def and not \newcommand, as the trick involves delimited arguments.