I need some help understanding this

Help and Feedback Scripting Support
#1

Note: idk if this is the right category

I am trying to understand this code here

 local player = game.Players.LocalPlayer
local CreateDialogueEvent = game.ReplicatedStorage.CreateDialogueEvent
local DialogueFrame = player.PlayerGui.ScreenGui.Frame

local function playSound(sound_id) -- Plays typing sound
	local sound = Instance.new("Sound",game.ReplicatedStorage)
	sound.SoundId = sound_id
	sound.Volume = 1
	sound.PlayOnRemove = true
	sound:Destroy()
end

local function textAnimate(content) -- Animates each letter
	for i=1,string.len(content) do -- why did they use content
		DialogueFrame.TextLabel.Text = string.sub(content,1,i) -- what is string.Sub?
		playSound("rbxassetid://915576050")
		if string.sub(content,i,i) == "!" or string.sub(content,i,i) == "." or string.sub(content,i,i) == "?" then
			wait(1)
		elseif 	string.sub(content,i,i) == "," then
			wait(.5)
		else
			wait(.05)
		end
	end
end

CreateDialogueEvent.OnClientEvent:Connect(function(image_id, content) -- activates when called from the Server
	if not player:findFirstChild("secretEnding") then
		DialogueFrame.ImageLabel.Image = image_id
		DialogueFrame.TextLabel.Text = ""
		DialogueFrame.Visible = true
		textAnimate(content)
	end
end)

it is a local script in starterCharacter scripts

The part I don’t understand is when they say string.Sub, I looked at the dev forum and it I still didin’t understand it, I am also confused why on the start they used the content in the for i loop

this script animates the text
I will comment the parts I don’t understand

#2

They use the content argument because it is the text they should animate, not sure why string.len was used when # can be used

string.sub basically gets a part of a string

local text = "This is text"

local textSub = string.sub(text, 1, 6) --Gets the first 6 letters

print(textSub) --Prints This i

It’s basically just used in that case for a typewriter effect and for getting specific characters to check if they’re equal to certain characters for the waiting part

#3

content is the parameter of the textAnimate function. When it mentions content it is most likely referring to the string to animate.

string.sub is used to get specific letters of a string. For example, let’s say I wanted to get letter 3 of the word “Hello”, I could do print(string.sub("Hello",3,3)), and it would print out the l.

In this case, they are looping through each letter of the string to animate it.

#4

The # symbol for length is only used with arrays, so when finding the length of a string, you need to use string.len().

#5

# works with strings as well

local text = "This is text"

print(#text) --Prints 12

image

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#6

Oh, I never knew that :slight_smile:, thanks for pointing that out!

I personally prefer string.len() because it looks more organized in my code.

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#7

hmmm ok, but what is the

string.sub(content,1,i)

like yeah I understand what the string.Sub does now, but why is there a (content, 1, i)

what does each one stand for?

#8

It’s basically saying,

Give me a portion of the content string from 1 (the beginning) to what number i is

Say the loop is at the 3rd iteration, it would be seen as

string.sub(content, 1, 3)

So it gets the first 3 characters

Say you have this

local text = "Hello"

for i = 1, #text do
	print(string.sub(text,1,i))
end

It would slowly print out the full string 1 character at a time, so the expected output would be this

H
He
Hel
Hell
Hello
#9

String.Sub(The text, 1, #text) – this will get all of the letters in the text that we have

is this correct?

if so then

for i = 1, #Text do
print(String.Sub(The text,1,#text)
end
#10

Yep, so if you have

local text = "This is text"

print(string.sub(text,1,#text))

It would basically act as you just printed the ext only

And no, in your case if you want it to go one letter at a time, you need to use i instead of #text if it’s a for i loop

#11

ohh ok, but then what would “i” stand for?

#12

The i is just the variable that stores the int to end the substring. Since it’s a loop, i is just whatever the iteration of the loop is.

#13

i would be the index/iterator, aka that variable you name in a for loop

Let’s go back tothis

local text = "Hello"

for i = 1, #text do
	print(string.sub(text,1,i))
end

There we have i, a for loop is basically a incremental loop. Here it’s saying to go from 1 to 5, since the stirng we have is 5 charactrs long. So it starts at 1, and prints the portion from the first character to 1, then it’s at 2 now, so it gets the first two characters and so on

#14

ohhh, ok that makes much more sense :slight_smile:

but then why did then use (content,i, i) here

		if string.sub(content,i,i) == "!" or string.sub(content,i,i) == "." or string.sub(content,i,i) == "?" then
#15

That’s for getting a single character only

Example

local text = "Hello"

print(string.sub(text,3,3)) --Prints l

In this case, it’s getting a single character and comparing it. So if the character is ! . or ? it will do something

#16

ohhh, ok

Thank you BmbatTheHybrid, this is very helpful :slight_smile:

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