Ttyjfyk

In some hand-me-down tex i inherited, a control sequence is used as a variable, for instance:

defaccessflavorats

it is used to generate postfixes on included tex files (called, i.e., image01_ats) and the like.

I want to use it in a conditional structure, i. e. something like

ifaccessflavor ats
This text is only shown if the Flavor of Access is 'ats'.
fi

I tried a a lot of variations, including various brackets, escape sequences and macros, but i cannot get it to work. Mostly, not even an error message appears. The online examples i found either deal with a more specific IF, like ifodd, ifx, etc., or more (seemingly) complex cases like testing two macros for identity.

Can somebody clear up the usage for me?

documentclassarticle
defatscomparetokenats
newcommanddomytest%
 ifxatscomparetokenaccessflavor MATCHES atselse DOES NOT MATCH atsfi

begindocument
defaccessflavorats
domytest

defaccessflavorpdq
domytest
enddocument

If you want to maintain the if...else...fi structure, you can use

documentclassarticle
usepackagepdftexcmds

makeatletter
newcommandflavor[1]%
 TTfi
 ifnumpdf@strcmp#1accessflavor=z@

makeatother

begindocument

defaccessflavorats

Shown

ifflavorats
This text is only shown if the Flavor of Access is `ats'.
fi

defaccessflavornotats

Not shown

ifflavorats
This text is only shown if the Flavor of Access is `ats'.
fi

enddocument

The usage of pdftexcmds is to obtain engine independence, so the code works with pdftex, luatex and xetex.

The trick is that if expands tokens.

Note that this can be used inside other conditionals.