What does "GetPlayerFromCharacter" do? I don't understand

Hello; you read the title.

I’ve been trying to understand what GetPlayerFromCharacter does in a script for the past couple of weeks but I haven’t made any progress in trying to understand what it does. Take this image from a YouTube tutorial I found for example, which supposably prints the name of the player that touches RedPart in the output.

Lines 1-6 make perfect sense, with lines 1-2 setting up variables that will make things slightly easier to type things out, and line 4 setting up a function (that will take up the rest of the script) that will be triggered when a player steps on RedPart. Line 6 is also understandable for me, as we are creating a variable that we can use to locate the parent of the object that touches the part. (This is so that the output can print a player’s username instead of printing the limb/accessory that touches RedPart, I think?)

Line 7 is what I don’t understand in the slightest. We’re making yet another variable that… I don’t know what it does. Like I’ve already said, I don’t know what GetPlayerFromCharacter does; but what I DO know is that when you run the game and touch RedPart, it will print your username, and when an item touches RedPart, it will print nil.

And so, my other big problem, why would you even use GetPlayerFromCharacter? I did some experimenting and removed line 7, and on line 8, printed the variable playerCharacter instead of player, and got a very similar result, with the only difference being that the output prints Workspace when something in the Workspace touches it instead of nil. What is this even used for?

I don’t ignore any replies, if your reply doesn’t get the “solved” checkbox, that means that I don’t understand your response, or there is already a response. (though it is currently nighttime the time I post this, and I will be online again in around 16 hours.)

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:GetPlayerFromCharacter is a built in Roblox function of PlayerService. It takes the players character (the model in workspace) and returns the player object.

Basically what’s happening is the players body part triggers the .touched function → it then gets the parent of that body part (aka the players character) → using the character we can get the actual player object using said function.

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GetPlayerFromCharacter is pretty self explanatory, It gets the Player from their Character.

When you use GetPlayerFromCharacter on something, it will check to see if that is a Character of a Player, if it isnt, it will return nil, but if it is, it will return a Player

One Example of its usage is getting the Player when they step on a Part (like the image), where you try to get the Player by the touched parts Parent, If the Part’s Parent (Potential Model) is a Players Character (which is a Model), it will return a Player, otherwise it will return nil.

When its used, it will not always gaurantee the exact player (as in it will not always work), so its recommended that you add an if statement to check if it actually returned something, otherwise you will experience errors.

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Just so you aren’t confused. It’s not printing your username. Its printing the Player object (which has the same username). Test in studio and open explorer (go to view → explorer) and look under “Players”, you will see your player object. If you look in workspace you will also see your character with the same name. However both are different.

Here’s an example use case. Let’s say we have a kill brick that should only kill players and not NPCs. Now for whatever reason both the player and NPC touch the kill brick. How do we know which one is a player? If we do “hit.Parent:FindFirstChild(“Humanoid”)”, it will return true cause both the NPC and players character model have humanoids in them.

So what we would do is use :GetPlayerFromCharacter(hit.Parent). If we use it on the players character then it will return the playerObject. However if we use it on the NPC it will return nil cause the NPC has no playerobject.

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GetPlayerFromCharacter is a function in Roblox Lua that takes a reference to a Character object and returns the associated Player object, if any. If the Character is not owned by any player (for example, if it is an NPC or an unowned object in the game), then the function will return nil.

Here is an example usage of GetPlayerFromCharacter:

local character = game.Workspace:FindFirstChild("MyCharacter")
local player = game.Players:GetPlayerFromCharacter(character)

if player then
    print("This character is owned by player:", player.Name)
else
    print("This character is not owned by any player.")
end

In this example, the script tries to find a Character object in the Workspace named “MyCharacter”. It then calls GetPlayerFromCharacter to retrieve the associated Player object (if any), and checks if the returned value is not nil. If the Player object is found, the script prints a message indicating that the character is owned by the player. Otherwise, it prints a message indicating that the character is not owned by any player.

I’ve read through all your responses but I still don’t understand.

Here’s two other side questions; what’s the difference between a “Player” and a “Character”? (I should’ve asked this in my original post now that I think about it; considering the fact that I’m trying to find out what something with the name of GetPlayerFomCharacter is, my bad.)

Also, all of you have mentioned “returning”. What do you mean by this? Are you trying to say “output”, or does it have anything to do with return?

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Putting it simply

The Player, is the person whose playing the game

The Character is the Players Avatar, or Person who is in the game.

The Player Instance is an Object that specifies the Player and what they are, who they are, and their Data.

The Character is a Group of Objects that come together to create your person that is rigged to work with Animations, and to follow specific inputs given by the player

Returning (like in the real word) just means you are returning something, as an example lets say you do a job for someone. And they give you money in return for doing it, in the case of scripting, you are calling the function, and that function is giving you something in return, some functions require some extra information (aka a parameter) to function.

Scripting Example:

function add(x, y) -- x and y are the parameters of this function
    return x + y -- the function will give you the sum of x and y
end


local data = add(1, 2)
-- here we are calling the function, and giving a piece of data called an Argument
-- You need a Variable for to get the Data its returning otherwise you wont get it

print(data) -- 3
-- Parameter x was 1
-- Parameter y was 2
-- 1 + 2 = 3
-- function gives you 3
-- return is very useful, i recommend you learn about it

To understand further you may need to learn more about the language, as im not really the person who teaches people about Lua, try looking into Documentation or Tutorials if that helps you.

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Nevermind, I was able to get some outside assistance on this whole thing. Thank you all for trying to help me.

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