Question

AS3 | Adove Air 3.5 | Flash CS6

I have html pulled from a source online put into a String that I’m taking apart piece by piece to build an XML file based off of the information I pulled. I need to search the whole String to remove characters following “info” up until the character “&”. There are multiple instances of this throughout the string, so I thought it would be best to use a RegExp. Other suggestions are welcomed.

//code from the website put into a full string
var fullString = new String(urlLoader.data);

//search string to find <info> and remove characters AFTER it up until the character '&'
var stringPlusFive:RegExp = /<info>1A2E589EIM&/g;

//should only remove '1A2E589EIM' leaving '<info>&'
fullString = fullString.replace(stringPlusFive,"");

The problem I’m having trouble figuring out is the “1A2E589EIM” is not consistent. They are random numbers and characters, and possibly length, so I can’t really use what I have written above. It will always lead up to a “&”.

Thanks in advance for any help.

Answer 1

I think the regexp would be more like

//search string to find <info> and remove characters AFTER it up until the character '&'
var stringPlusFive:RegExp = /<info>\w+&/g;

//should only remove '1A2E589EIM' leaving '<info>&'
fullString = fullString.replace(stringPlusFive,"<info>&");

now, if you are going to parse your string to XML, you could wait until you have your XML structure and just remove the info string from ‘info’ nodes

//code from the website put into a full string
var fullString = new String(urlLoader.data);

//parse to XML
var xml:XML = XML(fullString),
    index:int, text:string;

for each(var info:XML in xml.descendants('info')){
  text = info.*[0].text();
  index = text.indexOf('&');
  if(index != -1){
    info.*[0] = text.substr(index);
  }
}

I’m not sure about the affectation to *[0] but it should be something like that. Hope this helps.