ACTIONSCRIPT 3 Developer’s Guide en

ACTIONSCRIPT 3.0 DEVELOPER’S GUIDE
Using regular expressions
var str:String = "She sells seashells by the seashore.";
trace(str.search(/sh/)); // output: 13 -- Not the first character
With the i flag set, however, the regular expression does match the capital letter S:
var str:String = "She sells seashells by the seashore.";
trace(str.search(/sh/i)); // output: 0
The i flag ignores case sensitivity only for the A–Z and a–z characters, but not for extended characters such as É and é .
The m (multiline) flag
If the m (multiline) flag is not set, the ^ matches the beginning of the string and the $ matches the end of the string.
If the m flag is set, these characters match the beginning of a line and end of a line, respectively. Consider the following
string, which includes a newline character:
var str:String = "Test\n";
str += "Multiline";
trace(str.match(/^\w*/g)); // Match a word at the beginning of the string.
Even though the g (global) flag is set in the regular expression, the match() method matches only one substring, since
there is only one match for the ^—the beginning of the string. The output is:
Test
Here is the same code with the m flag set:
var str:String = "Test\n";
str += "Multiline";
trace(str.match(/^\w*/gm)); // Match a word at the beginning of lines.
This time, the output includes the words at the beginning of both lines:
Test,Multiline
Note that only the \n character signals the end of a line. The following characters do not:
Return (\r) character
Unicode line-separator (\u2028) character
Unicode paragraph-separator (\u2029) character
The s (dotall) flag
If the s (dotall or “dot all”) flag is not set, a dot (.) in a regular expression pattern does not match a newline character
(\n). So for the following example, there is no match:
var str:String = "Test\n";
str += "Multiline";
var re:RegExp = /.*?/;
trace(str.match(re));
However, if the s flag is set, the dot matches the newline character:
var str:String = "Test\n";
str += "Multiline";
var re:RegExp = /.*?/s;
trace(str.match(re));
In this case, the match is the entire substring within the tags, including the newline character:
Test
Multiline
Last updated 6/6/2012
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