• Adobe After Effects Expressions

  If Else When Source Text Contains String

  Posted by Sean Walkup on April 12, 2022 at 12:37 pm

  I am building a .mogrt with a paragraph that is all caps and has very tight line spacing. It works great until a user types the letter “Q”, then the descender overlaps the line beneath it. No problem I think to myself, I will just create an if/else that recognizes when the source text contains a “Q” and increase the line spacing. How hard could that be? Two hours later I am stumped.

  I added a Line Spacing animator to the text layer, searched the internet, and learned that there was such a thing as Regular Expressions, broke my brain trying to quickly understand them, and hoped something like this would work. Obviously, it did not.

  var txt = text.sourceText;

  var findQ = txt.test(“q”);

  if(findQ == true) {[value[0], 20]} else {[value[0], 0]}

   

  I am hoping one of you can see through my mistake and offer up an answer cause my brain hurts.

  Thanks in advance.

   

  Sean Walkup replied 4 years, 4 months ago 2 Members · 2 Replies
• 2 Replies

• 

  Filip Vandueren

  April 12, 2022 at 1:35 pm

  Hi Sean, you can do it without a regex like this:

  var txt = text.sourceText.value;
  var findQ = txt.includes("q");

  note that it doesn’t return true for Q, only lowercase q.

  If you want to do it with a regex test, you have to create the regular expression, and run the .test() method on the regex, not on a string, like this:

  var txt = text.sourceText.value;
  var regexQ = /q/i; // the i makes it case-insensitive: this will match a q or a Q
  var findQ = regexQ.test(txt);
• 

  Sean Walkup

  April 12, 2022 at 2:26 pm

  Filip, Thank you thank you thank you!!!!!!! I really appreciate it. It works like a charm. Amazing.

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