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Erroneous Expression Errors?
I haven’t found a thread that covers this, so:
Has anyone tried typing in part of an expression which is correct, but still gets flagged as an error?
I have had this happen multiple times: say I am linking a property to a property of a layer in a different comp. So I type in the target layer as comp(“H1”).layer(“Eye CTRL”) and I get an error. However, if I then pickwhip to the layer, I get the exact same text, but the error goes away.
I’ve compared every space and full stop and semi-colon for typos and it appears to be identical to what I typed.
Has anyone else had this issue and does anyone know why it happens…? -
3 Replies
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Can you post an example screen shot that shows the expression and the error message?
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I think it’s most likely that your entered text is not quite exactly the same as the pick-whipped version. That can easily happen if you copy and paste text, where you can pick up curly quotes instead of straight quotes or an en dash instead of a hyphen (minus sign). It’s a different story, of course, if you’re typing directly into the expression text field, but it would still help to see an example of what’s happening.
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Hi Dan, thanks for your reply.
Yeah, whenever this has happened I assumed that it must be a typo on my part (almost all the time, human error is to blame), even though I couldn’t find one . It doesn’t happen often, but often enough that I felt compelled to test it: so, this time I was very careful about typing it in correctly and then I copied what I typed so I could compare it with the pickwhipped version later. I pasted them in the same text document (and you can see them both below) and I could not find a difference at all, not even in the spaces (which are often “invisible” culprits). I even tried pasting one over the other and toggled undo/redo to see if I could spot a jump anywhere, but I couldn’t see anything. Weirdly, pasting either of them back into the expression field worked fine! But, for whatever reason, After Effects sometimes just doesn’t seem to like me typing things in from scratch…it must just be some random glitch when I’ve left it running too long (I often leave my projects open all week, until eventually something crashes them- I have a lot of scripts and plugins and they don’t all get along).What I should also have done, but forgot, was to take a screenshot of the error-flagged expression so you could see it…and of course now I can’t get it to happen again. But here are both versions anyway:
comp(“H1”).layer(“Eye CTRL”).transform.position
comp(“H1”).layer(“Eye CTRL”).transform.positionI wondered if any other users had had the same experience, but perhaps it’s just something with my particular installation of AE?
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