# Addressing individual letters in dynamic textfield

**URL:** <https://forum.kirupa.com/t/addressing-individual-letters-in-dynamic-textfield/265684>\
**Category:** flash\
**Created:** [July 11, 2008, 10:01am UTC](https://forum.kirupa.com/t/addressing-individual-letters-in-dynamic-textfield/265684 "2008-07-11T10:01:25Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 3\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![flobster](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/c5a1d2/32.png) [@flobster](https://forum.kirupa.com/u/flobster)\
**Post date:** [July 11, 2008, 10:01am UTC](https://forum.kirupa.com/t/addressing-individual-letters-in-dynamic-textfield/265684/1 "2008-07-11T10:01:25Z")

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Hi there,  
i couldn’t find anything about it, so is there a way to address individual letters in a dynamic textfield? I’d like to do some text tweenings but could not find a poper way of instanciating single letters. Of course it is possible to create a new textfield for text-values stored in an array, but this seem to be quite inefficient to me.

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![DiamondDog](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/74df32/32.png) [@DiamondDog](https://forum.kirupa.com/u/DiamondDog)\
**Post date:** [July 11, 2008, 10:50am UTC](https://forum.kirupa.com/t/addressing-individual-letters-in-dynamic-textfield/265684/2 "2008-07-11T10:50:14Z")

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I’m guessing the simplest/quickest way is going to be something like this

```auto
var greeting:String = myDynamicText.text;

var characters:Array = brokenApart(greeting);

trace(characters); // h,e,l,l,o,,, ,f,r,o,m, ,L,e,e,d,s

function brokenApart(inText:String):Array
{
    var retVal:Array = new Array();
    for(var i:int = 0; i < inText.length; i++)
    {
        retVal.push((inText.substr(i,1)));
    }
    return retVal;
    
} // end brokenApart

```

Obviously, if you wanted, you could make the brokenApart function more selective, so that it ignored spaces and/or punctuation, or only included characters on a given list.

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![flobster](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/c5a1d2/32.png) [@flobster](https://forum.kirupa.com/u/flobster)\
**Post date:** [July 11, 2008, 6:58pm UTC](https://forum.kirupa.com/t/addressing-individual-letters-in-dynamic-textfield/265684/3 "2008-07-11T18:58:18Z")

</div>

Thanks, DiamonDog. Your functions splits up text into substrings, which can be quite handy sometimes. Maybe I was not clear enough, but i’m looking for a way to address single letters as a Display Object to do various manipulations like text-effects etc. Guess there will be no quick & easy way…