Thanks for these replies! Adding \unexpanded or \protected before \def
didn't fix the problem, and surrounding the definition with \unprotect ...
\protect didn't work either. But surrounding it with \pushcatcodetable
\setcatcodetable\ctxcatcodes ... \popcatcodetable worked.

I've never seen these commands before, but I gather from the existing
documentation that the current catcode governs which characters are treated
as special when a buffer is being processed. So here, it looks like I'm
temporarily switching from some other catcode set (it looks like in
publ-ini.mkiv, \catcode\commentasciicode\othercatcode gets invoked
in \publ_set_publication, so perhaps that's what's happening?) to the
default ConTeXt catcodes and then back.

Thanks again!

Joey

On Sun, Oct 10, 2021 at 6:40 AM Wolfgang Schuster <
wolfgang.schuster.lists@gmail.com> wrote:

> Joey McCollum via ntg-context schrieb am 10.10.2021 um 05:42:
>
> The test using \removepunctuation that you provided does what it should be
> doing (it produces 6 instances of "test-test" with the intervening
> punctuation mark in each case removed), but it doesn't do what I'm trying
> to do in the MWE above. I'm trying to take certain punctuation marks that
> follow the \autopuncttest macro and place them before it instead. Looking
> at the typo-chr .lua and .mkiv files, I see that there are \pushpunctuation
> and \poppunctuation methods in addition to the \removepunctuation method.
> These might be useful for this purpose, but in any case, I still have to
> check if the trailing character is one of the characters in a specified
> set/string, and this is where the error is arising.
>
>
> Add \protected (or \unexpanded) to your command definition.
>
> \startbtxrenderingdefinitions[myspec]
> \protected\def\autopuncttest#1#2%
>   {\removeunwantedspaces%
>    \doifinstring{#2}{,.!?;:}{#2}%
>    \footnote{#1}%
>    \doifnotinstring{#2}{,.!?;:}{#2}}
> \stopbtxrenderingdefinitions
>
> Wolfgang
>
>