Searching your game for an object with a certain directory durring runtime?
I am trying to take a string
local path = "game.Workspace.Part.Position.X"
and I need to print the Parts "X" Position with that string using that path, so something like this
local path = "game.Workspace.Part.Position.X" print(path) --Output (Normal) --[[ game.Workspace.Part.Position.X ]]-- --Output (How I need it to be) --[[ 231 - (theoretical X position) ]]--
Is there anyway I can do this without recursively checking if every Object in my game has the same FullName as the path?
0
1 answer
This is actually pretty cool programming activity. The best way to do this would to be do some string manipulation. We basically treat every '.' as a divider between a parent and a child so we can get the name of something between each '.' and that will be the child we index from the parent we last indexed.
local path = "game.Workspace.Part.Position.X"
function proccessPath(s)
local currentParent = game
-- first thing we do is remove 'game.'
local startNum= string.find(s,'.',1,true) -- need to tell the function to only search for strings not patterns because if set to false it will consider '.' as any character
local currentString = string.sub(s,startNum + 1)
local foundPeriod
local foundChild
repeat
foundPeriod = false -- we can change this later instead of having an else statement to set it
foundChild = false
local startNum = string.find(currentString,'.',1,true)
if startNum then
foundPeriod = true
elseif string.len(currentString) > 0 then
foundPeriod = false
startNum = 0
else
break
end
local childName = string.sub(currentString,1,startNum - 1) -- first we index from the start of the string to the position of the period to get the current child
currentString = string.sub(currentString,startNum + 1) -- then we save the new string which slices out the child to go on to the next one
if typeof(currentParent) == "Instance" and currentParent:FindFirstChild(childName) or pcall(function() return currentParent[childName] end) then
foundChild = true
currentParent = currentParent[childName]
end
until not foundPeriod or not foundChild
if foundChild then
return currentParent -- returns part or property we got from the path name
else
warn("Child or property could not be found :(")
end
end
print(proccessPath(path))
Outputs --> -6 Which was the position of the one part in my workspace at that time. The best thing about this is it works for properties too so you can do say "game.Workspace.Part.Position.X"
Well uh have fun with this function or whatever your gonna do with it. Cheers