Conditions and Variables

You cannot use inserts or modifiers in the vars section of a passage, so you cannot write something like:

[if cousins > 10]
largeFamily: true
--
You sit back in your chair and consider everyone you'll need to invite to the reunion.

Instead, there are two ways you can assign a variable a value based on a condition. First, you can assign a variable to the result of a comparison, either true or false:

largeFamily: cousins > 10
--
You sit back in your chair and consider everyone you'll need to invite to the reunion.

This passage sets the variable largeFamily to either true or false, depending on what value the variable cousins has. However, you may want to set variables to other types of values besides booleans. To do this, add a condition to the assignment:

transportation: 'car'
transportation (kilometers > 1000): 'plane' 
--
You'll need to take a {transportation} to get there.

This example demonstrates two new things about vars sections:

• You may change a variable more than once in a single vars section. Chapbook changes the variables in the order they are written, top to bottom.
• If you write an expression inside parentheses before the colon (:) that tells Chapbook what value to set, that particular line will only take effect if the expression evaluates to true.

So first transportation is set to 'car', and then, if kilometers is greater than 1000, the value of transportation is immediately changed to 'plane'. Chapbook runs through each variable assignment in sequence, doing nothing else in between, so the two assignments effectively work as one.

Here's a more complex example showing how multiple assignments and conditions go hand in hand.

language: 'an unknown language'
language (country === 'Brazil'): 'Portuguese' 
language (country === 'China'): 'Mandarin' 
language (country === 'Ethiopia'): 'Amharic'
language (country === 'Russia'): 'Russian'
language (country === 'Australia' || country === 'United States'): 'English'
--
The official language of {country} is {language}.

Although Chapbook sets variables in the order you write them, often times it won't matter much, as you'll usually want to write conditions that are mutually exclusive of each other--that is, only one line ever takes effect.