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I need to create counters with names like mycounter1, mycounter2,... Basically this should be a counter-valued data array. The code like 

\newcounter{index}
\newcounter{\csname mycounter\the\value{index}\endcsname}

does not work. It seems that it is impossible to use \csname...\endcsname for counter names. Using \expandafter with different variants also does not help. Is there a way to resolve this problem?

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  • Could you give an example application? Perhaps there are more efficient ways to cope with the problem.
    – egreg
    Sep 24, 2012 at 17:15
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    Oct 5, 2012 at 16:32

2 Answers 2

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Counters do not have a leading backslash which is what the \csname would put in it. So

\newcounter{mycounter\Alph{index}}

does the job. With counters it appears that numbers also work:

\newcounter{mycounter\arabic{index}}.

The MWE below yields:

enter image description here

Notes:

Code:

\documentclass{article}

\newcounter{index} 
\setcounter{index}{1}

\newcounter{mycounter\arabic{index}}
\newcounter{mycounter\Alph{index}}


\begin{document}
Counter\arabic{index} = \arabic{mycounter\arabic{index}}

Counter\Alph{index} = \arabic{mycounter\arabic{index}}
\end{document}
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  • Yes, also numbers work, because \newcounter{<string>} does \expandafter\newcount\csname c@<string>\endcsname. So even \newcounter{@#^&*({})} would work. :-) For renewing the \the... command associated to it, do \expandafter\renewcommand\csname @#^&*({})\endcsname{\alph{@#^&*({})}}. ;-)
    – egreg
    Sep 24, 2012 at 17:19
  • 1
    @egreg those are the names that LaTeX counters should have; I don't know why Lamport et al. chose such exotic names like page or chapter for counters ;-)
    – Gonzalo Medina
    Sep 24, 2012 at 20:10
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There are the forarray and the arrayjobx packages for handling arrays with LaTeX.

And of course LuaLaTeX offers arrays natively in Lua.

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