Question

I have created a bunch of movie clips which all have similar names and then after some other event I have built up a string like:

var clipName = 'barLeft42' 

which is held inside another movie clip called ‘thing’.

I have been able to get hold of a reference using:

var movieClip = Eval( '_root.thing.' + clipName ) 

But that feels bad – is there a better way?

Answer 1

Movie clips are collections in actionscript (like most and similar to javascript, everything is basically key-value pairs). You can index into the collection using square brackets and a string for the key name like:

_root.thing[ 'barLeft42' ] 

That should do the trick for you…