Webmaster Forum / Flash / Data Integration / August 2006

I have a static, UTF-8 encoded XML document that gets loaded by a custom movie
clip class into an array and then items from the array are read and displayed
in a dynamic text field that is attached to the movie clip, depending on which
one is rolled over. Everything works perfectly except that an ampersand
displays as & apostrophes display as ' and quotes display as ', even
if I use the special character inside the XML. Higher level character codes
actually display properly, so character codes for circle shaped bullets,
registered trade mark symbol, Greek characters, etc, work! But a blessed
ampersand does not.

Setting the dynamic text field to either read as HTML or not read as HTML
makes no difference.

Using CDATA tags in the XML makes no difference. In fact, when I use CDATA
tags and enclose text containing a special character code, Flash goes the extra
step of converting the ampersand in the special character code to &!! So '
becomes ".

Using & just gets converted to &. So Flash is parsing the &#38 to an
ampersand, which it then converts to &. WHY? And how do I stop it?

I found the function below to clean out the unwanted characters, and it works,
but it seems a ridulous length to go to. And I probably have to extend it to
accomodate whatever other characters don't work in Flash, but I don't know what
those might be until I encounter them. And the whole point to using the XML was
so that someone without Flash could update the file.

Thanks for any help.

private function cleanTextFunc(txt):String {
        txt = txt.toString();
        txt = txt.split("'").join("'");
        txt = txt.split("&").join("&");
        txt = txt.split(""").join("\"");
        return txt;
}