Logging value of randomly chosen text

[mawilson]

Is there a way to log the actual text of a text object? The situation is that I’m randomly choosing 1 of 12 possible words to use for each trial, and I need to log which one is chosen.

I’ve tried a few things, but most seem to get stuck on the fact that using getX() doesn’t return a value. So setting a number variable and logging it works, but then I can’t use it to get the word. Alternatively, I can directly get the word by string concatenation (as below), but then I can’t log the word that gets chosen (since logging a text object logs the time it was printed but not what the text is).

Here’s a link to the experiment: https://farm.pcibex.net/r/PtpjPM/

And here’s a code snippet:

newText("word", variable["word_" + Math.floor(Math.random() * 12)]).print().log()

This just logs the print time of the text, but not the actual text.

The alternative I tried is this:

newVar("word_num", Math.floor(Math.random() * 12)).log(),
newText("word", variable["word_" + getVar("word_num")]).print()

but this doesn’t work because getVar(“word_num”) doesn’t actually return the value.

What I’d like to do is log ideally the value of the word that gets chosen, but at least log the random number so I can reconstruct that choice later.

[mawilson]

Nevermind; I figured out how to do this. I’ll post it in case anyone else comes across a similar issue.

Template("practice.csv", variable => {
    var word = variable['word_' + Math.floor(Math.random() * 12)];
    return newTrial("trial_prac",
        // ... whatever else you want here
        newText("word", word)
        // ... whatever else you want here
    ).log("word", word)
})

[Jeremy]

Hi,

newX commands (and their arguments) are evaluated immediately so even if you were able to directly refer to the value of the Var element (which you can: getVar("word_num").value) you wouldn’t necessarily get what you want, because the execution of a PennController trial (and of the commands on its elements) happens, well, whenever the trial is executed

You could do this instead:

newVar("random_word", variable["word_" + Math.floor(Math.random() * 12)] ).log(),
newText("word", "").text( getVar("random_word") ).print()

or

newTrial("trial_prac",
// ...
  word_num = Math.floor(Math.random() * 12),
  newText("word", variable["word_" + word_num]).print()
//...
)
.log("word_num", word_num)

EDIT: sorry, I just saw your second message. That’s a great solution (it’s actually cleaner than creating a variable within newTrial like I suggest)

Jeremy

• This reply was modified 2 years, 1 month ago by Jeremy.

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