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What is the difference between \relax and {}?
The title suggest the question. On and off, I see macros here in TeX.SE and I see the \relax command frequently.
- I was wondering what it does and where/when should I used it?
- Are there any precautions that I should take while using it? (Are there side-effects?)
It would be great if you support your answers with a simple example.
Although \relax does nothing by itself, it is a safe command to stop expansion of another command. Some examples:
(plain tex) \hskip 5pt\relax -- in the absence of \relax, the \hskip will keep looking for plus or minus
(latex) at the end of a line, \\ \relax [...] will prevent what is in brackets from being interpreted as a dimension that would add vertical space
(actually, this is pretty well explained by answers to this question.)
It is what's called a no-op: It does nothing, and it's used in various places where you don't want anything done, but the syntax requires something. TeX's rules also dictate that in an \if statement, an undefined macro will compare equal to \relax. So it's sort of a general-purpose nothing.
(The empty brace group {} is another kind of nothing, as the question linked to by David Carlisle illustrates).
\ifconstructions.\mymacro12345\relax 678would make it stop at five and then do whatever else it's supposed to do. There are many more usecases but that's pretty much the main reason of its appearance in the answers here.--for command line options in most Unix shell tools.