Expressions: Leading zeros and decimal places.

[Colin Braley]

Here is an expression for source text that should add leading zeroes to a number. Just modify the amtOfZeroes variable and pick whip the nums variable to whatever the source of your number is.

//–Expression begins
nums = thisComp.layer(“Deep Lime Green Solid 1”).effect(“Slider Control”)(“Slider”);
amtOfZeroes = 10;
//–Do not modify below this line
isNeg = false;
if(nums < 0) { nums = Math.abs( nums ); isNeg = true; } sVal = Math.round( nums ) + ""; while(sVal.length < amtOfZeroes) { sVal = "0" + sVal; } if(isNeg) sVal = "-" + sVal; sVal //--Expression ends ~Colin

[Colin Braley]

Here is a a simple way to round a number to a specified amound of decimal places:
Just pick whip nums to something else and change the value of the numOfPlaces variable to make it round to a different number of decimal places.

//–Begin Expression
nums = thisComp.layer(“Deep Lime Green Solid 1”).effect(“Slider Control”)(“Slider”);
numOfPlaces = 3;
//–Do not modify below this line

function roundTo(number, places)
{
num = Math.round ( Math.pow(number, places) );
num /= Math.pow(10, places);
return num;
}

roundTo(nums, numOfPlaces)

//–End expression

~Colin

[Jakub Michalski]

Wow, great!

Would never thought of doing these loops for adding the zeros! Decimal places are perfect as well. Thank you very much – this will help me a lot in debugging my expressions!

[Colin Braley]

Glad I could help.
~Colin

[Navarro Parker]

Found this during a Google search and I’m getting odd results.

I have a slider set to “50.00”, but the expression is displaying “125” (no decimals or trailing zeros). I set it to “15.00” and I get “3.375”. I set the slider to “20.00”, and it displays “8”.

I realize when this was first posted, everyone was on v6.5, not CS6. Has expressions changed that much?

[Navarro Parker]

This expression does not handle decimals under CS6. It rounds to the nearest whole number. Could you possibly modify it to work with current expressions?

[Dan Ebberts]

It works as expected for me in CS6.

Dan

[Navarro Parker]

That’s so weird. Here’s what I’m getting with CS6 11.0.2

[Dan Ebberts]

I think I’d just do it like this:

num = thisComp.layer(“Deep Lime Green Solid 1”).effect(“Slider Control”)(“Slider”).value;
numOfPlaces = 3;
num.toFixed(numOfPlaces);

Dan

[Navarro Parker]

Yeah, but then you are losing the leading zeros from the original expression. (but I never got it to work)