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(+2)

Hi I'm working on a small game very loosely inspired by Her Story. The player types a keyword into a search bar "display.text" and if valid it takes them to a new part of the game. Very simply I am doing this by creating cards and if the player types in the name of the card it will take them there. I used the following script on the button.

on click do

go[ display.text "SlideLeft"]

end

Is there a way for me to check for invalid entries so I can display an alert? Currently, it doesn't do anything. I'm not sure if there's a way to create a list of valid keywords and check from that, or else check from the list of cards that are there and go from there.


Thanks!

(+1)

Sure- there are several ways to approach something like this!

The "in" operator can be used to check a string against a hardcoded list of valid options:

on click do
  if display.text in ("Keyword1","Keyword2","Keyword3")
   go[display.text "SlideLeft"]
  else
   alert["404: Page not found."]
  end
end

And it is also possible to obtain a list of valid card names from the deck; deck.cards is a dictionary from card names to cards:

on click do
  if display.text in deck.cards
   go[display.text "SlideLeft"]
  else
   alert["No such card, I'm afraid."]
  end
end

It might be a good idea to make the comparison case-insensitive if a user is typing free input. The easiest way to handle this would be to make sure the card names are all lowercase and then to convert the user input to lowercase with the "format" operator before doing any checks:

on click do
  t:"%l" format display.text
  if t in keys deck.cards
   go[t "SlideLeft"]
  else
   alert["I don't know anything about that."]
  ends
end

Yet another option is to make a dictionary to associate one or more keywords with destination cards; this provides more options for "forgiveness" in input handling:

on click do
  words["reindeerflotilla" ]:"puzzle1"
  words["reindeer flotilla"]:"puzzle1"
  words["reindeer"         ]:"puzzle1"
  words["smashthestate"    ]:"puzzle2"
  words["smash the state"  ]:"puzzle2"
  
  t:"%l" format display.text
  if t in words
   go[words[t] "BoxIn"]
  else
   alert["that's bogus!"]
  end
end

Does that make sense?

(+1)

Yes that does, thanks so much!