Question

i have a problem where i want to remove the last character from a textfield (including linebreaks) that has multiple textformats without removing the formats.

so far i have:

textfield.replaceText(textField.length-1,textField.length-1,'');

i guess this doesn’t remove linebreaks, and is very slow, seems to destroy my textformats.

or:

textfield.text = textfield.text.slice(0,-1);

this is faster but removes all textformats as well.

Answer 1

It is a bit tedious, but you can use the htmlText-property of TextField, even though you are not formatting your text with StyleSheets: Flash will transform all your formatting information into HTML text internally, so even though you set textField.text, you can still get xml formatted text to work with:

textField.text = "A test.";
trace (textField.htmlText);

will actually return:

<P ALIGN="LEFT"><FONT FACE="Times Roman" SIZE="12" COLOR="#000000" LETTERSPACING="0" KERNING="0">A test.</FONT></P>

Text will always appear within <FONT> tags reflecting the changes you made using setTextFormat(). You can, therefore, iterate over the XML contained in this line, and remove only the last character in the last TextNode:

private function removeLastCharacter (textField:TextField) : void {
    var xml:XML = new XML (textField.htmlText);
    for ( var i : int = xml.children().length()-1; i >= 0; i-- ){
        var node:XML = xml.children()[i];
        if ( node.name() == "FONT") {
            var tx:String = node.text()[0].toString();
            node.setChildren (tx.substr (0, tx.length-1));
            break;
        }
    }
    textField.htmlText = xml; 
    trace (textField.text); // In the above example, output will be: "A test";
}