Replacing white space in a string

A handy little tip, if all you need to do is rip out spaces in a string don’t bother with using slice(), use regex instead. Copy the following line of code and replace ‘-’ with whatever you need to replace the space with…

yourString = yourString.replace(/\s+/g, '-');

So for example, if yourString=”blah blah blah”, it will now become “blah-blah-blah”. This is especially useful for amending URLs.

Happy new year!

Maintaining Aspect Ratio

When manipulating large images for backgrounds or full-screen image galleries, one of the most common problems that I’ve encountered is maintaining the image’s aspect ratio on resize. Especially so if I’m playing with a dynamically fed gallery that contains images of different size ratios.

So here’s the solution to your woes. It’s one that’s worth saving to one side as a “copy and paste solution”. Increase the height of the image (or movieclip) to the size that you want it to be and then apply the following line of script…

(AS3)

mc.scaleX > mc.scaleY ? mc.scaleY = mc.scaleX : mc.scaleX = mc.scaleY;

(AS2)

mc._xscale > mc._yscale ? mc._yscale = mc._xscale : mc._xscale = mc._yscale;

(“mc” of course should be replaced with the target of your image or movieclip)

Hope that helps!

Removing non alpha-numeric characters from a string

Need to strip slashes, back slashes, hyphens and other symbols from a string? Looked at regex and cried “why? why? why?” at the moon repeatedly? Considered throwing your monitor out of the window? No worries. Here’s your solution:

var r:RegExp = new RegExp(/[^a-zA-Z 0-9]+/g) ;
yourString = yourString.replace(r, "");

Robert’s your father’s brother.

Converting characters into a URL friendly format

There is a handy command in Actionscript that I’d previously never encountered until this week:

escape()

If you’re receiving a text input and needing to send it out to a URL, for example in a search box, you need to convert any special characters into character codes before you request the URL. For example, a space should be sent as %20.

The escape() command allows you to do this with one command rather than having to search through character by character and reference it to a character codes array.

More