# Text Replacements

Text replacements allow you to dynamically change and interact with text. You can switch out placeholders to create more dynamic text.

Imagine you have the following translation:

{
    "example.text": {
        "translations": {
            "EN_US": "Greetings {name}!"
        }
    }
}

We now would like to exchange {name}. Replacement text is always surrounded by curly brackets! If you don't replace it it will remain in your text. Now in your state render method you can render your text:

renderer:AddText("example.text", {{"name", "Harrald"}})

As you can see the second parameter is a lua array with lua arrays. The first value in the inner array is the key to replace alias name in our case. The second value is what we would like to add in there. In this case we are replacing it with a plain string, but we could also put in another translation:

local npcName = GetTranslation("npc.harrald.name") -- note you would have to add a translation here
renderer:AddText("example.text", {{"name", npcName}})

Now you can color the name in another translation and inject it into the first one. You can also add more by adding more elements:

{
    "example.text": {
        "translations": {
            "EN_US": "Greetings {name} the {role}!"
        }
    },
    "npc.harrald.name": {
        "translations": {
            "EN_US": "<color=\"Orange\">Harrald</color>"
        }
    },
    "npc.harrald.role": {
        "translations": {
            "EN_US": "<color=\"Black\">Blacksmith</color>"
        }
    },
}

local npcName = GetTranslation("npc.harrald.name")
local npcRole = GetTranslation("npc.harrald.role")
renderer:AddText("example.text", {{"name", npcName}, {"role", npcRole}})