Expression to control the opacity of individual words in a text layer

[Dan Ebberts]

I think this will work. It assumes your list of words you want to dim are in a text layer named ‘reference words’.

On your other text layer, you’d add an Animator for opacity and set the opacity value to 60%. Then you’d add an expression selector and delete the range selector. Set the Based On parameter to Words, and add this expression for the Amount:


words = thisComp.layer("reference words").text.sourceText.split(" ");
val = 0;
thisWord = text.sourceText.split(" ")[textIndex-1];
for(i = 0; i < words.length; i++){
if (words[i] == thisWord){
val = 100;
break;
}
}
val


Dan

[Mark Boxall]

Hi Dan, Thank you so much for responding to this post.

Sorry to be a pain, but I’ve tried the script and it returns the error for line 3 “property or method named ‘5’ in class ‘Array’ is missing or does not exist.” is it possible to tell what’s causing the error?

Thanks again for your help!

Mark

[Dan Ebberts]

The only thing I can think of is that you could get that error message if you didn’t set the Based On parameter of the expression selector to Words.

Dan

[Mark Boxall]

Hi Dan, I’ve realised that the error was possibly due to line breaks in the text (it works when I take them out). Is it possible to break up a text string based on spaces and carriage returns?

Thanks again!
Mark

[Dan Ebberts]

There’s probably a more efficient way to do it, but this should work:


refText = thisComp.layer("reference words").text.sourceText;
words = refText.replace(/\r?\n|\r/g, ' ').replace(/\s{2,}/g, ' ').split(" ");
val = 0;
thisText = text.sourceText.replace(/\r?\n|\r/g, ' ').replace(/\s{2,}/g, ' ');
thisWord = thisText.split(" ")[textIndex-1];
for(i = 0; i < words.length; i++){
if (words[i] == thisWord){
val = 100;
break;
}
} val


Dan

[Mark Boxall]

Hi Dan, That works perfectly!

Thank you so much for your help, not just on this question, but also for your website, and through your willingness to help people out on sites like this.

It really is appreciated!

[Thomas Alexandrov]

I have a question for you Dan,

how to add more words (Sat, Sun) in this code:

 

txt = text.sourceText;

if (txt.length > 0 && txt == “Sun”) 100 else 0;

 

Thnx

[Dan Ebberts]

If it’s a small number of words you could do it like this:

txt = text.sourceText;
txt.length > 0 && (txt == "Sat" || txt == "Sun") ? 100 : 0;