ACTIONSCRIPT 3 Developer’s Guide en

ACTIONSCRIPT 3.0 DEVELOPER’S GUIDE
Internationalizing applications
Collator Property Effect
numericComparison Controls whether digit characters are treated as numbers or as text.
ignoreCase Controls whether uppercase and lowercase differences are ignored.
ignoreCharacterWidth Controls whether full-width and half-width forms of some Chinese and Japanese characters are
evaluated as equal.
ignoreDiacritics Controls whether strings that use the same base characters but different accents or other diacritic
marks are evaluated as equal.
ignoreKanaType Controls whether strings that differ only by the type of kana character being used are treated as equal.
ignoreSymbols Controls whether symbol characters such as spaces, currency symbols, math symbols, and others are
ignored.
The following code shows that setting the ignoreDiacritics property to true changes the sort order of a list of French
words:
var words:Array = new Array("COTE", "coté", "côte", "Coté","cote");
var sorter:Collator = new Collator("fr-CA", CollatorMode.SORTING);
words.sort(sorter.compare);
trace(words); // cote,COTE,côte,coté,Coté
sorter.ignoreDiacritics = true;
words.sort(sorter.compare);
trace(words); // côte,coté,cote,Coté,COTE
Case conversion
Flash Player 10.1 and later, Adobe AIR 2.0 and later
Languages also differ in their rules for converting letters between uppercase forms (majiscules) and lowercase forms
(miniscules).
For example, in most languages that use the Latin alphabet the lowercase form of the capital letter “I” is “i”. However
in some languages (such as Turkish and Azeri) there is an additional dotless letter “ı”. As a result in those languages a
lowercase dotless “ı” transforms into an uppercase ”I”. A lowercase “i” transforms into an uppercase “İ” with a dot.
The StringTools class provides methods that use language-specific rules to perform such transformations.
Using the StringTools class
The StringTools class provides two methods to perform case transformations: toLowerCase() and toUpperCase(). You
create a StringTools object by calling the constructor with a locale ID. The StringTools class retrieves the case
conversion rules for that locale (or a fallback locale) from the operating system. It is not possible to further customize
the case conversion algorithm.
The following example uses the toUpperCase() and toLowerCase() methods to transform a German phrase that
includes the letter “ß” (sharp S).
Last updated 6/6/2012
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