For programmers, it is quite common to use the name of a macro (for
instance `foo' for the macro \foo, in other words, the letters f, o,
and o).  For this purpose, it is customary to call \string which does
this sort of things...  except that it prepends the escape character,
controlled by the counter \escapechar, in front of the name.  The
traditional way of getting rid of it, is to set \escapechar to -1
(without forgetting to restore the proper value at the end of the
process) or to make use of \@gobble.  The former has the drawback not
to be expandible while the second isn't completely reliable.  Here we
extend the expandible methods to make it reliable.

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