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Reply From: |
Bernard Cloutier |
Let’s see if I understand: you want to use the content of the incoming parameter to select the variable to print, but without explicitly checking it (ie: if incoming == "alive": print(alive) elif incoming == "dead" ...), right? You can use index notation to access a variable’s content with a string, like this:
var myVar = "Hello world"
func _ready():
var stringToPrint = self["myVar"]
print(stringToPrint)
Your script 2 would end up like this:
var alive = "I live!"
var dead = "I'm not alive!"
func _testing_for(incoming):
print(self[incoming])
However, if you feel the need to access different variables by string, it usually indicates that what you want is a dictionary. Here’s what that would look like:
var states= {
"alive": "I live!",
"dead": "I'm not alive!"
}
func _testing_for(incoming):
print(states[incoming])
You can add a check to see if the key exists in the dictionary before accessing it (if states.has(incoming): ...), since accessing a value that doesn’t exist will throw an exception, but sometimes you want the game to crash immediately while developping so you can catch errors sooner (ex: the caller shouldn’t call _testing_for with a value that doesn’t exist.
An improved version would use something like an enum for keys:
enum States {
alive,
dead
}
var states= {
States.alive: "I live!",
States.dead: "I'm not alive!"
}
func _testing_for(incoming): #incoming must be one of States enum
print(states[incoming])
You would call _testing_for from another scripts like so:
func _set_parameters():
var outcome
if test = true:
outcome = $other_script.States.alive
else:
outcome = $other_script.States.dead
$other_script._testing_for(outcome)
Using an enum means you can more clearly define what values can be passed to your function and makes it less likely that you’ll make typos in your strings.
Looks like making a dictionary was what I needed to do. I appreciate the run down on enums too. I haven’t tried using either of those methods yet, until now. The doc’s make it look much more intimidating than it is.
Thank you!
