• Adobe After Effects Expressions

  Is there an expression that looks at the first character of a text layer?

  Posted by Gietr Zula on November 18, 2020 at 2:38 pm

  I need an expression that changes the value of the position of a layer based on the first character of a text layer. For example if the frst character is “A” the position is 0,100. If the first letter is “B” the position is 0,200 etc.

  Could anyone please help? Thanks in advance!

  Giet

  Matt Volp replied 5 years, 9 months ago 2 Members · 1 Reply
• 1 Reply

• 

  Matt Volp

  November 18, 2020 at 4:10 pm

  You could use

  str.charAt(0)

  where the argument, in this case, ‘0’, is the character of the string you want to look at. So something like this:

  str = text.sourceText;
  firstLetter = str.charAt(0);
  if (firstLetter ===  "A") {
  	[0,100]
  } else if (firstLetter ===  "B") {    
  	[0,200]
  }

  If you wanted to do it programmatically, perhaps something like this would work:

  str = text.sourceText;
  firstLetter = str.charAt(0);
  letters = ["A","B","C","D","E","F","G","H"];
  for (i = 0; i < letters.length; i++) {
  	if (firstLetter === letters[i]) {
  		y = (i+1) * 100;
  		break;
  	}
  }
  [0,y];

Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up