Change font color of text that is between brackets (Inline color)

[Maeve Tan]

I have some dynamic elements I’m trying to get to work. I would like to change the font color of a word in a sentence that is between brackets. Also, the word between brackets should be the only one that changes color by a hex code. The hex code is provided by the user. So the text and text color would all be dynamic.

e.g input text is: Hello [Friend]

The word “friend” should then be in another color, which would be a color provided in a hex code.

In my project, I have 3 text layers: 2 input layers which are for the text and the hex code, and 1 output layer, which will display the final result.

At the moment I could only figure out, grabbing the input text to display in the Output layer, and the coloring.

var inputText = thisComp.layer("Input Text").text.sourceText;
inputText;

This is on the Output layer, to which I added a Fill effect. The expression is on the Color property from the Fill:

var myColor = thisComp.layer("Input Color:").text.sourceText;
var rgb = hexToRgb(myColor);
rgb;

So right now the text would be displayed as: Hello [Friend]
But what I would like is to have it display as: Hello Friend
And the word “friend” would be in the color of the hex code that the user will input

I hope my question is clear enough, and thanks in advance for your help!

[Dan Ebberts]

<div>On your output layer, add this expression for Source Text:</div>

txt = thisComp.layer("Input Text").text.sourceText;
if (time < 0)
  txt
else 
  txt.replace(/[\[\]']+/g,'');

Add a Fill Color Animator, add an Expression Selector, delete the Range Selector, set the Expression Selector’s “Based On” parameter to “Words”, and apply this expression for Amount:

txt = text.sourceText.valueAtTime(-1);
idx = textIndex - 1;
txt.split(" ")[idx].indexOf("[") > -1 ? 100 : 0

Add this expression to the Fill Color:

hexToRgb(thisComp.layer("Input Color:").text.sourceText.value)

Note this this will remove all square brackets from the text, but only requires that a word start with [ to get the fill color applied. You could require both [ and ] brackets, but that would be a little more complex.

[Maeve Tan]

Hi Dan, thank you so much! This works 🙂
Can you explain a little bit more about what each expression does? (except for the hexToRgb, this one I understood what it does)

TIA! 🙂

[Dan Ebberts]

<div>In getting ready to write up a little explanation for the expressions, I realized that I made them way more complicated than they needed to be. The first one could be simplified to this:</div>

txt = thisComp.layer("Input Text").text.sourceText;
txt.replace(/[\[\]']+/g,'');

which just grabs the input text and applies a Regular Expression to remove the bracket characters.

The second one could be simplified to this:

txt = thisComp.layer("Input Text").text.sourceText;
idx = textIndex - 1;
txt.split(" ")[idx].indexOf("[") == 0 ? 100 : 0

which just checks each word of the input text to see if it starts with “[” and if so, applies the fill color.

[Maeve Tan]

Thank you, Dan! I did notice the first one could be simplified to what you have now. Just didn’t know what

if (time < 0)

does.

Thanks for the explanation and help!

[Dan Ebberts]

Normally you would use the negative time trick to have a property make its pre-expression value available to other properties where they could use valueAtTime() with a negative number. However, in this case that wasn’t necessary because the pre-expression value is still available from the Input Text layer, so it was an unnecessary extra level of complexity.

[TIneke Van Schalkwyk]

Very helpful!

It works great on my test text layers but when I apply it to one that has key frames (for captions) it has an error.
Any ideas?