[barn]

So many times, when duplicating movie clips, enumerating them via a for loop, I find myself counting the characters in the duplicate's instance name so I can perform a <b>substr()</b> operation to dynamically extract the number from the instance name.

I'm got tired of counting characters, so I wrote a function to extract the identifying number for me:

Code:

function parseNum (uValue) {
    var sValue = (typeof (uValue) == "movieclip") ? uValue._name : uValue;
    for (var cI = 0; cI<sValue.length; cI++) {
        if (sValue.charCodeAt(cI)>46 && sValue.charCodeAt(cI)<58) {
            break;
        } else {
            continue;
        }
    }
    return parseInt(sValue.substr(cI));
}

You can pass this function either a reference to a clip or the instance name itself.

Passing the instance name:

Code:

onClipEvent(load){
    nID = _root.parseNum(this._name);
    trace(nID);
}

Passing the reference:

Code:

onClipEvent(load){
    nID = _root.parseNum(this);
    trace(nID);
}

And in either case, the function will discard everything in the instance name up to the occurence of the first numeric digit.

It will then to a <b>parseInt()</b> on the remainder of the string, returning an integer value representing the identify of the clip instance.