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Quotation Marks in a String
Time for my first post, after years of browsing for answers. Let’s dive in.
I’m parsing through text and turning each character into a number value on a slider (this is a small part of a very large portion of code, but that at least provides context), and I’m running into trouble matching ” and ‘ this way. I’ve tried to separate it by adding the backslash (\), but to no avail. Simply triple quoting (“””) returns an error and disables the expression. I can single double single (‘ ” ‘), which does not return an error, but also doesn’t match.
So, does anyone know what I’m missing here? I figured those two would give me trouble as they are special characters.
Thanks, for helping me here and many years before, even though you didn’t know it.
textVal = thisComp.layer("Evaluate").text.sourceText;
slideVal = effect("Chicklet_Value")("Slider");
textLength = thisComp.layer("Type Words").text.sourceText.length;
offsetVal = Math.floor(linear(time, 0, (timeSlider+.5), 0, textLength))if (offsetVal == textLength){
slideVal = 0}
else if (textVal == "a"){
slideVal = 1}
else if(textVal == "b"){
slideVal = 2}
else if(textVal == "c"){
slideVal = 3}
...
...
else if(textVal == """){
slideVal = 47}
else{
slideVal = 0}
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7 Replies
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The single-double-single should work if your text actually contains the double quote character. For example, if you apply this to a slider, you’ll get 3, as expected:
myStr = ‘abc”def’;
myStr.indexOf(‘”‘)Dan
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Hmm… when I do that, I don’t receive an error, but my output is 0, which is the final “else” in my if/else statement. It’s as if it’s recognizing that it’s valid, but not returning the correct value.
I should add that it is comparing to literally one character at a time. So it is looking at just a set of quotation marks, or just one letter, so there shouldn’t be much room for error. I’m doing this using offset and pointing a variable to a layer’s source text that is displaying just the one letter at a time.
I could copy all the code in here, but I have lots of layers involved that depend on each other, so I thought it would be easier to understand by breaking it down to basics. If you need more information please let me know.
Matt
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Is it possible a curly quote snuck in there? Can you paste in (here) the string you’re trying to parse?
Dan
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Sure, sorry about the delay.
Also, sorry about the string….. it’s for testing purposes, and you know how you can go a little crazy 40 lines in…
——
abc, 123, ba”aaaby 🙂 you and me gurl!
——Just copied and pasted that straight out of the text layer in AE.
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That appears to be a right curly quote (”), so it won’t match a straight double quote (“).
Dan
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Well I am clearly out of my depth here with curly vs straight. So in my expressions, I’m using all straight quotes, but I need to match back to curly somehow? The ideal would be to be able to match to curly, since that is apparently the default, so if someone types a quote into that layer, it would match back without special formatting needed.
Or would there be a way to automatically change the quotes to straight? I’m already changing everything to lowercase at the moment just for matching purposes.
I’ll do a little googling but curly vs straight is never something I’ve run into.
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For anyone finding this post much later, my solution to compare quotes in an expression was to convert it to it’s code.
For example
if (string.charCodeAt(0) == 8221) {
do stuff }
else if (string.charCodeAt(0) == 8220){
do stuff
{Those are the codes for right and left curly quotation marks in AE
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