Text highlight (expression selector)

[Filip Vandueren]

Oh yeah as a bonus: since the marker lines are textcharacters you can do all kinds of fancy reveal animations with them by varying the type of range selector and or adding different properties instead of just the horizontal scaling I did in the example

[Yoan Boisjoli]

Yeah I started playing with it! It’s pretty cool! I’ve had the brackets “[]” replace with a zero width space (“\u200b”) so I can easily target it with other expression selector (color for example).

I’ll try to see if I can have the spaces between words be highlighted too when more than a word is selected in between brackets. I’ll let you know !

[Filip Vandueren]

It’s not that easy I believe, because the brackets could span multiple lines and you have to test for that.

Like I hinted, usually just a bit of extra horizontal padding can bleed them together.

BTW: I haven’t actually tested it in Premiere ? I hope it doesn’t break there ?

[Yoan Boisjoli]

Hey Filip, been awhile! I finally got to test everything out in premiere. I gave the choice of color control for text, box and highlighted text and it works well ! It’s a bit slow (lots of calculations!) but it runs well as a mogrt !

I wanted to thank you cause I was really stuck with that one !

[Yoan Boisjoli]

Ah and by the way, when you mention JSON.parse or stringify, is it a way to call back an expression written in another layer?

[Filip Vandueren]

Hi Yoan,

I use it to precompute some values in a text-layer, and then use the output of that textlayer as data in another expression.

If the result of a textlayer is just string we need to use, or a number, then you can simply get the value or value.parseFloat() of the textlayer, but in some cases you want to precompute a list of values or a list of key/value pairs.

a JSON type object is ideal for this.

So the expression on my precompute text layer ends with JSON.stringify(myStuff);

-> this turns the object or list of data I have into “readable/parseable” sourcecode including brackets, quotes,…

And where I want to use that information, I do JSON.parse(textlayer.text.sourceText.value) to “read” the generated sourcecode of the data object, and so the data becomes part of the expression.

Before the new Javascript engine, the alternative was to use eval(), which can do even more (it can actually execute functions and statements, not just import a data object)

[Filip Vandueren]

So again to clarify: it doesn’t let another expression see inside the expression code of another property, but it’s a way to format the resulting string-value of a sourceText expression into something another expression can easily interpret.

[Yannick Michel]

Hi Filip and Yoan,
I was looking through your thread because I need something quite similar to what you have done but a little different. Let me explain: I need to create a .mogrt for my colleagues where they can highlight multiple words in a text. And the idea is to have a text input where they write their text and another text input where they write the words they want to highlight. Here you can see that I succeed to highlight one word, but I can’t figure out how to highlight multiple words.
here is the expression I use to highlight one word:

txt=thisComp.layer(“Highlight”).text.sourceText;

words = txt.split(/\s/);

RE = new RegExp(words,”g”);

hl=text.sourceText.replace(RE, function($0) {

return ‘~’.repeat($0.length);

});

if(hl.charAt(textIndex-1) == ‘~’) { 100 } else { 0 };

I found some code on workbench youtube channel. I know I need a loop

for (i=0, i<words.length, i++){}
But since I am still no master in expression, I don’t know how to write it down. So if one of you hase the answer, it would be great.

Thank you

[Filip Vandueren]

Hey Yannick,

I would use this code in an expression selector based on Words:

thisWord = text.sourceText.value.split(/[\s\3]+/)[textIndex-1];
wordList = thisComp.layer("wordlist").text.sourceText.value.split(/[\s\3]+/).map(e => e.toLocaleLowerCase());
wordList.includes(thisWord.replace(/[\.,?!…:;=]$/gi,'').toLowerCase()) ? 100 : 0;

It does a few extra things so it also matches words regardless of case (everything is converted to lowercase), and it also matches a word when that is immediately followed by a punctuation mark (you may want to extend that list).