<p>I have created a bunch of movie clips which all have similar names and then after some other event I have built up a string like:</p>

<pre><code>var clipName = "barLeft42"
</code></pre>

<p>which is held inside another movie clip called 'thing'.</p>

<p>I have been able to get hold of a reference using:</p>

<pre><code>var movieClip = Eval( "_root.thing." + clipName )
</code></pre>

<p>But that feels bad - is there a better way?</p>

Movie clips are collections in actionscript (like most and similar to javascript, everything is basically key-value pairs). You can index into the collection using square brackets and a string for the key name like:
```
```
_root.thing[ "barLeft42" ]
```
```
That should do the trick for you...