ACTIONSCRIPT 3.0

ACTIONSCRIPT 3.0 DEVELOPER’S GUIDE
Working with strings
FILENAMETITLEWHITE_THRESHHOLDBLACK_THRESHHOLD
FruitBasket.jpgPear, apple, orange, and bananad810
Banana.jpgA picture of a bananaC820
Orange.jpgorangeFF20
Apple.jpgpicture of an apple6E10
The file uses a specific tab-delimited format. The first line (row) is a heading row. The remaining lines contain the
following data for each bitmap to be loaded:
The filename of the bitmap.
The display name of the bitmap.
The white-threshold and black-threshold values for the bitmaps. These are hex values above which and below
which a pixel is to be considered completely white or completely black.
As soon as the application starts, the AsciiArtBuilder class loads and parses the contents of the text file in order to
create the “stack” of images that it will display, using the following code from the AsciiArtBuilder class’s
parseImageInfo() method:
var lines:Array = _imageInfoLoader.data.split("\n");
var numLines:uint = lines.length;
for (var i:uint = 1; i < numLines; i++)
{
var imageInfoRaw:String = lines[i];
...
if (imageInfoRaw.length > 0)
{
// Create a new image info record and add it to the array of image info.
var imageInfo:ImageInfo = new ImageInfo();
}
}
// Split the current line into values (separated by tab (\t)
// characters) and extract the individual properties:
var imageProperties:Array = imageInfoRaw.split("\t");
imageInfo.fileName = imageProperties[0];
imageInfo.title = normalizeTitle(imageProperties[1]);
imageInfo.whiteThreshold = parseInt(imageProperties[2], 16);
imageInfo.blackThreshold = parseInt(imageProperties[3], 16);
result.push(imageInfo);
The entire contents of the text file are contained in a single String instance, the _imageInfoLoader.data property.
Using the split() method with the newline character ("\n") as a parameter, the String instance is divided into an
Array (lines) whose elements are the individual lines of the text file. Next, the code uses a loop to work with each of
the lines (except the first, because it contains only headers rather than actual content). Inside the loop, the split()
method is used once again to divide the contents of the single line into a set of values (the Array object named
imageProperties). The parameter used with the split() method in this case is the tab ("\t") character, because the
values in each line are delineated by tab characters.
Last updated 4/22/2013
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