• Adobe After Effects Expressions

  Replace certain characters in a text field with different characters.

  Posted by Christopher Rutherford on September 1, 2020 at 4:20 am

  I’m currently building text animation and need to replace certain characters with certain symbols dynamically. Specifically, I’d need to replace all characters excluding spaces with the letter b.

  I realize I can do “.replace” on a per character basis, but would it be resource intensive for AE to comb through 52 “.replace” strings every time it hits a text layer?
  And even if I do, I notice that if there are two characters in a row to be replaced, the second one is left alone for some reason.

  Any thoughts?

  Filip Vandueren replied 6 years ago 2 Members · 1 Reply
• 1 Reply

• 

  Filip Vandueren

  September 2, 2020 at 7:00 am

  You’d have to do a replace with regular expressions in stead of strings.
  read all about them here: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Guide/Regular_Expressions

  for example:

  t=text.sourceText.value;
t.replace(/\w/g, "b");

  would replace all \w = “word” characters by the string “b”
  (but it would keep whitespaces, punctuation, symbols some accented letters,…)

  or

  t=text.sourceText.value;
t.replace(/[^ \r\n\u0003]/g, "b");

  would replace anything that’s NOT (because of the [^…] syntax) a space, a carriage return, a newline, an end-of-text meta character (unicode 0003 = shift-enter) by the string “b”

Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up