ACTIONSCRIPT 3 Developer’s Guide en

ACTIONSCRIPT 3.0 DEVELOPER’S GUIDE
Working with strings
Empty string A string that contains no text, white space, or other characters, written as "". An empty string value is
different from a String variable with a null value—a null String variable is a variable that does not have a String instance
assigned to it, whereas an empty string has an instance with a value that contains no characters.
String A textual value (sequence of characters).
String literal (or “literal string”) A string value written explicitly in code, written as a text value surrounded by double
quotation marks or single quotation marks.
Substring A string that is a portion of another string.
Unicode A standard system for representing text characters and symbols in computer programs. The Unicode system
allows for the use of any character in any writing system.
Creating strings
Flash Player 9 and later, Adobe AIR 1.0 and later
The String class is used to represent string (textual) data in ActionScript 3.0. ActionScript strings support both ASCII
and Unicode characters. The simplest way to create a string is to use a string literal. To declare a string literal, use
straight double quotation mark (") or single quotation mark (') characters. For example, the following two strings are
equivalent:
var str1:String = "hello";
var str2:String = 'hello';
You can also declare a string by using the new operator, as follows:
var str1:String = new String("hello");
var str2:String = new String(str1);
var str3:String = new String(); // str3 == ""
The following two strings are equivalent:
var str1:String = "hello";
var str2:String = new String("hello");
To use single quotation marks (') within a string literal defined with single quotation mark (') delimiters, use the
backslash escape character (\). Similarly, to use double quotation marks (") within a string literal defined with double
quotation marks (") delimiters, use the backslash escape character (\). The following two strings are equivalent:
var str1:String = "That's \"A-OK\"";
var str2:String = 'That\'s "A-OK"';
You may choose to use single quotation marks or double quotation marks based on any single or double quotation
marks that exist in a string literal, as in the following:
var str1:String = "ActionScript 3.0";
var str2:String = 'banana';
Keep in mind that ActionScript distinguishes between a straight single quotation mark (') and a left or right single
quotation mark (' or ' ). The same is true for double quotation marks. Use straight quotation marks to delineate
string literals. When pasting text from another source into ActionScript, be sure to use the correct characters.
As the following table shows, you can use the backslash escape character (\) to define other characters in string literals:
Last updated 6/6/2012
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