verbatim code inside \newcommand definition

Question

All the questions I could find on this subject are about people who want to use \verb in the argument passed to a command, or about people who want within a \newcommand to wrap one of the arguments within a \verb(atim).

Instead, I just want to use a \verbatim environment within something like a \newcommand. More specifically, I've tried the following:

\newcommand \MyFoo {
blabla
\begin{verbatim}
hihi
\end{verbatim}
}

and as you probably all know, this doesn't work: the definition goes through, but when I try to use \MyFoo I get an error about File ended while scanning use of \@xverbatim.).

Strictly speaking, I don't need to use \newcommand. What I have is a bunch of chunks (which contain plain normal text, as well as verbatim elements) stored in a file, and then I want to construct various documents from this by selecting various of those chunks: in one document I might want to use chunk 4, 7, and 9, while in another I might want 4, 6, 7, and 8.

The only solution I could find so far is to store each chunk in a separate file (so I just \input the relevant chunk instead of calling a command containing the chunk), but editing hundreds of small files is much too inconvenient, so I'd much rather keep all the chunks in a single file.

I'm thinking of writing a script which extracts the relevant chunks, but I'm still hoping there's a more direct solution. Now that I think about it, I could also live with someway to set the list of enabled chunks somewhere, then \input the chunks-file and within that file have each chunk be conditionalized on its inclusion in the list of enabled chunks.

Answer 1

\documentclass{article}

\begin{document}

\newsavebox\MyFooA
\begin{lrbox}{\MyFooA}
\begin{minipage}{\textwidth}
 blabla
\begin{verbatim}
hihi
\some \command
& % in verbatim
\end{verbatim}
\end{minipage}
\end{lrbox}

\newsavebox\MyFooB
\begin{lrbox}{\MyFooB}
\begin{minipage}{\textwidth}
 a second
\begin{verbatim}
in classic \TeX you 
would run out of boxes
but have ~32 thousand these days
\end{verbatim}
\end{minipage}
\end{lrbox}

\begin{center}
\usebox{\MyFooB}  
\end{center}


and

\begin{center}
\usebox{\MyFooA}  
\end{center}

and B again

\begin{center}
\usebox{\MyFooB}  
\end{center}




\end{document}