Search for a certain letter in the last line of a text

Adobe After Effects Expressions

Search for a certain letter in the last line of a text

Posted by Niels Karner on July 13, 2023 at 3:15 pm
I am trying to search for a certain letter in the last line of a text
with always different numbers of lines. I have already managed the
search for the letter, I am only missing the possibility to limit the
search to the last line. Sometimes it is only one line and sometimes two
or even more.
```
var t = sourceRectAtTime().top;
var h = sourceRectAtTime().height;
var y = t + h;
var l = y-5;
var Q = y-3.5;
var J = y-4;
```
var txt = text.sourceText;

var findlower = txt.includes(“q”)||txt.includes(“p”)||txt.includes(“g”)||txt.includes(“j”)||txt.includes(“y”);
var findQ = txt.includes(“Q”);
var findJ = txt.includes(“J”);

if(findlower == true){[0,l]}
else if(findJ == true){[0,J]}
else if(findQ == true){[0,Q]}
else [0,y];

I tried it with .split(“r”)[x]; but I can only select a certain line, which doesn’t help if I don’t know which one is the last.

Thanks for helping me!
Brie Clayton replied 3 years ago 4 Members · 6 Replies
6 Replies

Dan Ebberts

July 13, 2023 at 3:49 pm

This should give you the last line:

txt = text.sourceText;
lines = txt.split("\r");
lastLine = lines[lines.length-1];

Filip Vandueren
July 15, 2023 at 6:20 pm

It looks like you are testing for the case that a letter with an ascender will change the sourceRect.

A good alternative is to change all characters to a character that has full height for your font (using a text animator) and check the sourceRect.

You can do that on a second hidden text-layer, or there are tricks to do it on the same layer: in negative time, inbetween frames so you would do sourceRectAtTime(-1) and have a text animator with change character that’s only active if time<0
Niels Karner
July 19, 2023 at 12:39 pm

That sounds very interesting, can you give me an example of that?😄
Filip Vandueren
July 19, 2023 at 8:00 pm
Sure, suppose you want to have a sourceRect for a textlayer, but you want that sourcerect to be tall enough to contain descenders, even if there aren’t any in the current text. (useful if you want to line up multiple

Choose a character for your current font that has a full height both above and below the baseline, for example the pipe symbol “|” is good in many fonts. (Or you can use a character that doesn’t have any ascenders or descenders like “x” , but then add a margin you know will be enough for the font)

Add a “character value” textanimator to your text, with this expression:
```
"|".codePointAt(0);
```
You’ll see all the characters change to |. If you would take the top and height of the sourceRect of the layer now, you’ll get the margin of the descenders.

But if you change the expression to:
```
time < 0 ? "|".codePointAt(0) : 0;
```
Everything is normal again, the text will only be changed to |||| when the time <0.

So now you can do this:
```
sr1 = sourceRectAtTime(time);
sr2 = sourceRectAtTime(-1);
l = sr1.left;
w = sr1.width;
t = sr2.top;
h = sr2.height;
```
The horizontal parameters are based on the actual text, the vertical parameters are based on the text as it exists (hidden) in negative time: every character replaced by “|”

You may want to add an extra margin because stuff like Á is taller than |

I hope that’s clear.
Niels Karner
July 20, 2023 at 6:19 am

This works perfectly and is by far better than what I was doing before. Thanks a lot for this!

@Dan Ebberts your solution has also helped me a lot. Thank you too!
Brie Clayton
July 20, 2023 at 2:15 pm

Thanks for your solve, Filip!

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