ftrim() HScript function

Problem

Sometimes you want to reference the value of a parameter and display it as a string to put in a Font SOP, or the Viewport Comment of a Camera node when you’re wedging sims or making some sort of visualizer.

But quite often, if you’re referencing a float parameter, you wind up getting allllll the digits that come with it, full precision and all, rather than just the nice value you see in the interface.

ie.

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0.04

becomes

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0.040000000000000001

which is probably not what you want!

A possible solution to trim off some of the extra digits might look something like

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floor(ch("/some/parm") * 1000)/1000

Unfortunately, this fails too :(

Solution

The solution is actually quite simple! We can use the ftrim() function from HScript. ftrim() will strip off all those unwanted digits and leave you with a nice clean value, pretty much as you typed it!

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Some Parameter Value: `ftrim(ch("/some/parameter"))`

Of course, this also works in a Font SOP too.

Update 9 Jan 2022

Here’s a handy snippet for programmatically wrapping channel references in ftrim(). Taken from the Linewriter tool.