Question

This is not necessarily specific to ActionScript 3 but I could not think off the top of my head how you would access an instance via string or even if that is possible.

What I have going on is a function in one scene being passed a String which in my case is the name of a particular instance of a movie clip. Is there a way to use that String to access that instance on that scene, IE being passed the string I could change the alpha of that instance which matches the name of the string passed.

Thank you

Answer 1

basically, it is possible to access all public instances of an object/a scene by doing the following:

myMovieClip["myInstance"]

This is equivalent to

myMovieClip.myInstance

So, when you pass a string to a function in order to access a particular instance of that scene, you could, for example, do the following:

function myFunc(name:String, alpha:Number):void {
    myMovieClip[name].alpha = alpha;
}

Hope that helps!