Grabbing the mouseWord

April 25, 1999
by Pat McClellan

Dear Multimedia Handyman,

I basically have these words popping up randomly on the screen (through use of randomness to switch cast members) and then when a user clicks on one of the words, I want that word to appear in a sentence at the top. Please help. Thanks.

Joe Blo

Yo Joe,

No sweat. You need to read up in your Lingo Dictionary about the command "the mouseWord". Also take a quick review of the section in your Using Director manual about dealing with fields -- specifically the part about "word X of field whatever".

Let's say that you have a field displayed on stage. That field, named "Example", contains the following text:

"This is a text field"

Now, using the message window do this...

put word 2 of field "Example"
-- "is"

We can do the same thing in your movie with lingo, using the mouse to indicate which word. The term "the mouseWord" will return an integer which tells us which word in the field was clicked. To convert that integer to the actual word (string), we use the same syntax as the example above. Here's the behavior for it.

global gWordList
on mouseUp me
  set myMem = the member of sprite the spriteNum of me
  set myField = the name of myMem
  set myWord = word (the mouseWord) of field myField
  append gWordList, myWord
end

Download the source code in Mac or PC format.

Good luck with your project.

Patrick McClellan is Director Online's co-founder. Pat is Vice President, Managing Director for Jack Morton Worldwide, a global experiential marketing company. He is responsible for the San Francisco office, which helps major technology clients to develop marketing communications programs to reach enterprise and consumer audiences.