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.

Here’s a simple function that utilises it:

public function processSearchTerm(s:String):void
{
var URLString:String = escape(s);
_rModel.searchTerm = URLString;
}

Calling this function, eg:

var oldString:String = "a test string";
var newString:String = processSearchTerm(testString);
trace(newString);

Should return:

a%20test%20string

Hopefully if you weren’t aware of it already, it will save you as much time as it did me!

However if you want to target a new browser window you can now do so by adding an additional parameter…”_blank”. See the example below:

var input:String = "blah blah blah http://www.burnedouthippy.com blah blah blah";
var fU:FindURL = new FindURL(input, "_blank");
var output:String = fU.Process();

If you run a trace on output, you’ll see that the new string has HTML a tags inside it and it also now targets a new browser. You can change “_blank” for any other HTML target and it should work just fine…alternatively, completely leave out the second parameter and it will automatically target “_self”.

Download the FindURL v1.2

Sometimes I get around these chunks of code using snippets (see Lee Brimelow’s tutorial on how to set up snippets in Flex Builder), but sometimes the code is crying out for a simple class to be made – in my opinion, loading external stylesheets is one of these times.

If you google “actionscript 3 external stylesheets” you are very likely to come across this explanation by Adobe.

Now don’t get me wrong, after studying it for a couple of minutes you’ll see that the code is pretty straightforward. Firstly it sets up a textfield, then an external file loader. Then it uses the file loader to load the stylesheet and when the stylesheet has been successfully loaded it applies the stylesheet to the textfield and adds the appropriate HTML text. Fine. Long-winded, but fine.

But this is exactly the kind of situation that frustrates me. If I wanted to load several stylesheets for several different textfields, I’d be backed up in a pile of repeating code setting up loaders and success/error functions. It makes much more sense to me to have a CSSLoader class that I can simply send the instance name of the textfield, the text that I want to put into the textfield and the name/path of the stylesheet file – and then let the class set up a loader and check that the file has loaded correctly. As I currently can’t think of a situation where this wouldn’t apply, that is exactly what I’ve done.

You can find the class here.
You can find example files here.

Now all you have to do is create a textfield and then type something similar to the following:

var cssLoader:CSSLoader = new CSSLoader(tfield, someText, "example.css");

Isn’t that easier? In this case, “tfield” is the instance name of the textfield, “someText” is a String containing the HTML text you want to format (eg taken from an XML node) and “example.css” is the name/path of the external stylesheet. The class does the rest for you – it takes the text, throws it into the textfield and styles it. Much easier I’m sure you’ll agree and a lot less confusing when it comes to dealing with large numbers of textfields.

Please remember to set the textfield property “Multiline” to “true”, or else your HTML paragraph tags won’t work. Check out my basic example to see that in action.

If you can think of any situation where this class may need extending, please let me know. I am open to friendly suggestion of expanding its usefulness.

However if you’re a hardcore developer and don’t agree with me simplifying something that is essentially pretty simple to start with – I apologise if I have offended your sensibility, but this works better for me. Please don’t spam me, I won’t reply. I’m here to help like-minded designer/developers, not to get into an argument. Cheers!

This new version corrects a rather embarrassing issue – the class was returning no text at all if no URL was present in the text. I was so wrapped up with trying to get it to look for URLs in a text block, it didn’t cross my mind to test it without any at all! Problem solved now though, simply overwrite the previous version and everything should work as before.

Whilst I was playing around with the Twitter API I was beginning to get wound up by the fact that the XML feed from Twitter only sends out text versions of tweets and not HTML versions. For example, lets say a tweet says “Check out this cool link: http://www.plagro.com”, the xml feed from twitter would send out:

Check out this cool link: http://www.plagro.com"

as oppose to the html version containing the “a” link tag:

Check out this cool link: <a href="http://www.plagro.com">http://www.plagro.com</a>

So after trawling the forums looking for alternative feeds and/or HTML convertors, I came to the conclusion that it would be easier to write a small class that simply finds links within blocks of text and adds in the html tags so it can be displayed as HTML text. The result is the FindURL class.

You can find the FindURL class here and example files here.

Using the FindURL class is very simple. Firstly unzip it into the place where you store all of your actionscript classes and then use the following two lines of AS code whenever it’s needed. Feed it the text you want converting and then receive the String it returns.

//create a new FindURL and send it the text to process
var linkFinder:FindURL = new FindURL(testString);
//return the new processed text
var newString:String = linkFinder.Process();

Finally, please note that I found the Regular Expression used in my FindURL class online. It IS borrowed, it may not be perfect and I can’t offer you any support on it. I will also happily credit the line’s author when I eventually work out who that is – but that particular piece of code has been used seemingly dozens of times by different developers so the author is still ambiguous.

Hope it’s of use to you! Let me know how you get on and if there’s any way you’d like to see it expanded – I’m always open to suggestion.