• Adobe After Effects Expressions

  rearranging live text

  Posted by Ryan Dunn on June 30, 2017 at 11:35 pm

  First time poster, long time lurker (and appreciator of the wonders to be found here).

  I am looking for help with an expression that will take a line of text of varying length and swapping the last half of the text with the first to create a resulting layer of text.

  So the master text layer might say…

  “ONCE IN A WHILE I’M THINKING OF YOU”

  And the second text layer would say…

  “I’M THINKING OF YOU ONCE IN A WHILE”

  I have some conceptual grasp of getting lengths, indexing, and splitting into strings, but I’m having trouble getting this effect to work.

  Thinking ahead, I would also have to account for an odd number of words, and making sure that there is a properly placed space after swapping the text around.

  Any help would be much appreciated.

  Thank you.

  …ryan

  Ryan Dunn replied 9 years, 1 month ago 2 Members · 4 Replies
• 4 Replies

• 

  Dan Ebberts

  July 1, 2017 at 12:24 am

  How does the expression know where to split the text?

  Dan
• 

  Ryan Dunn

  July 1, 2017 at 12:46 am

  Thanks for the quick reply Dan. I would think spaces would work for this purpose.

  …ryan
• 

  Dan Ebberts

  July 1, 2017 at 4:08 am

  Maybe something like this:

  
sp = value.split(" ");
if (sp.length > 1){
a = b = "";
n = Math.floor(sp.length/2);
for (i = 0; i < sp.length; i++){
if (i < n){
b += sp[i] + " ";
}else{
a += sp[i] + " ";
}
}
a+b
}else
value


  Dan
• 

  Ryan Dunn

  July 1, 2017 at 5:02 am

  This worked like magic, Dan. Wait, WAS it magic?

  Once this project I’m working on is public, I will share with you what this handiwork was for.

  Much appreciated.

  …ryan

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