Question

I have a block of text I am dynamically generating. It is about two sentences or so long, and only some of the words in the two sentences need to be able to trigger an event. For example, if I had “The cow jumped over the moon”, I would like to make it so “cow” could be hovered over and have something pop up. After playing with TextField some, it seems like it is not possible to do that there. Is it possible using some other construct (or hack)? If so, how?

Answer 1

Yes it can be done:

• Use getCharIndexAtPoint to get the index of the character below the cursor

• From this index, expand (check the characters to the left and right and stop when you reach a delimiter – space, coma, etc.) to get the word under
  the cursor

• Finally display your message based on the word you just found.

Here’s some sample code. I didn’t check if it compiles, but that should give you the general idea:

var fullText = textField.text;
var index = textField.getCharIndexAtPoint(cursorLoc);
var delimiters = " \n\r\t,?;!"; // Add a full list of delimiters here
var left = "";
var right = "";

for (var i = index - 1; i >= 0; i--) {
    var c = fullText.charAt(i);
    if (delimiters.indexOf(c) >= 0) break;
    left = c + left;
}

for (var i = index + 1; i < fullText.length; i++) {
    var c = fullText.charAt(i);
    if (delimiters.indexOf(c) >= 0) break;
    right = right + c;
}

var word = left + fullText.charAt(index) + right;