ActionScript 3.0 Cookbook: Solutions for Flash Platform and Flex Application Developers

Problem

You have a list of values as a string and you want to parse it into an array of separate elements.

Solution

Use the String.split( ) method.

Discussion

The split( ) method of the String class splits a string containing a list of values into an array. The list must be delimited by a uniform substring. For example, the list Susan,Robert,Paula is comma-delimited.

The split( ) method takes up to two parameters:

delimiter

The substring that is used to delimit the elements of the list. If undefined, the entire list is placed into the first element of the new array.

limit

The maximum number of elements to place into the new array. If undefined, all the elements of the list are placed into the new array.

You can use a space as the delimiter to split a string into an array of words:

var list:String = "Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers"; // Split the string using the space as the delimiter. This puts // each word into an element of the new array, words. var words:Array = list.split(" ");

The split( ) method can be extremely useful when values are loaded into Flash using a URLLoader object or another similar technique for loading data. For example, you might retrieve a list of names as a string from the server such as the following:

names=Michael,Peter,Linda,Gerome,Catherine

You can make it easier to use the names by parsing them into an array using the split( ) method:

// Assume _loader is the URLLoader used to load the data. var namesData:String = _loader.data; var names:Array = namesData.split(",");

See Also

Recipe 5.7