Create Line Break After X Number of Characters

[Bryce Poole]

Okay, this appears to have solved the issue, incase anyone else is trying to do something similar.

txt = value
if (thisComp.layer("Overlay TXT Here").text.sourceText.length >= 61) {
txt.substring(0,61) + "\r" + txt.substring(62,999);
} else {
txt
}

[Dan Ebberts]

That works as long as you don’t have to worry about splitting the text in the middle of a word, or having a line with one character, etc. If you need to address those types of issues, the solution becomes more complex.

Dan

[Bryce Poole]

Hey Dan,

Preventing it from splitting in the middle of a word is actually something I’d really like it if the code could handle, I was doing some test this afternoon and was just offsetting any breaks mid word with extra spaces before to it down to the next line, but thats really clunky…

Do you have any thoughts on a more elegant way to write this?

Thank you so much!
— Bryce P.

[Dan Ebberts]

I just crammed it into what you have, but this would be one way (I’m sure there are others):


txt = value;
if (thisComp.layer("Overlay TXT Here").text.sourceText.length >= 61){
for (i = 61; i > 0; i--) if (txt[i] == " ") break;
if (i > 0)
txt.substr(0,i) + "\r" + txt.substr(i+1)
else
txt.substring(0,61) + "\r" + txt.substring(62,999);
}else{
txt
}


Dan

[Bryce Poole]

Dan, this is excellent, this code makes it so much cleaner than what I had, I really appreciate the help. Thank you very much!!

[Olga Povarchuk]

Hi Dan or anyone else that can help,

I tried this expression in my own project and it works pretty well.. I modified it to create a line break after the 10th character. Only problem is it disables right when it hits character 10. At 9 it’s fine, at 11 it’s fine, but at 10 in doesn’t seem to know what to do.

Doing my best to figure it out but unfortunately I’m relatively new to this and my debugging abilities are limited. Hopefully it’s a simple fix. Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Olga

txt = comp("EDIT_THIS_COMP").layer("Text").text.sourceText;
if (comp("EDIT_THIS_COMP").layer("Text").text.sourceText.length >= 10){
for (i = 10; i > 0; i--) if (txt[i] == " ") break;
if (i > 0)
txt.substr(0,i) + "\r" + txt.substr(i+1)
else
txt.substring(0,10) + "\r" + txt.substring(11,999);
}else{
txt
}


[Rombout Versluijs]

sorry guys to bother, im just starting with this scripting. Ive used a code to generate dynamic text in a textfield on the stage, this gets filled by comment text of a marker. Im using this to add onscreen comments for the audio people without me having to keyframe everything.

txt = value;
n = 0;
if (thisComp.marker.numKeys > 0){n = thisComp.marker.nearestKey(time).index;
if (thisComp.marker.key(n).time > time) n--;
if (n > 0) txt = thisComp.marker.key(n).comment;
}
txt;

This is the code which grabbs the text from the comment section in a marker. When i combine this with the above for line breakes it stops working. Ive tried making a second variable and putting it below the loop, but didnt work

[Mårten Gunge]

That is a nice piece of code. How would this look if you want three or four lines? Lots of else ifs or is there maybe a neater solution?

[Stephen Pickering]

[Mårten Gunge] “. How would this look if you want three or four lines? Lots of else ifs or is there maybe a neater solution?”

I know this is an old post, but did you ever figure this out? I’m wondering the same thing.

Thanks!
Stephen

[Kalleheikki Kannisto]

This should work for any number of lines. Ripped it from an old project of mine and simplified some. Set the char_per_line variable to the number of characters you want. The text will break only on the space character.

The esc variable is a precautionary measure to avoid endless loops, for example in those cases where there is no space character. I think — I don’t remember the details of the logic. But you may need to set it higher if your text needs to break onto more than 100 lines.

txt = value;
char_count = txt.length;
char_per_line = 60;
lines = Math.ceil(char_count/(char_per_line));
done = 0;
esc = 0;
len =0;
row = char_per_line;
while (done == 0){
esc ++;
len+=row;
if (txt.length >= len+1){
for (i = len; i > len-row; i--) if (txt[i] == " ") break;
if (i > len-row){
txt=txt.substr(0,i) + "\r" + txt.substr(i+1,9999);
}
}
len = i;
if (esc>100){done=1}
}
txt

Kalleheikki Kannisto
Senior Graphic Designer