Question

In ActionScript3 i wanted to get the text between 2 quotes from some HTML using a input index value where i would simply increase the 2nd quote characters value by 1. This would be very simple however i have now noticed using indexOf does not seem to work correctly with quotes and other special characters.

So my question is if you have some HTML style text like this:

var MyText:String = '<div style="text-align:center;line-height:150%"><a href="http://www.website.com/page.htm">'; 

How can i correctly get the index of a quote ” or other special character?

Currently i try this:

MyText.indexOf('"',1)

but after 0 it always returns the wrong index value.

Also a quick additional question would be is there a better way than using ‘ ‘ to store strings with characters like ” inside? So if i had other ‘ characters etc it won’t cause problems.

Edit –

This is the function i had created (usage = GetQuote(MyText,0) etc)

        // GetQuote Function (Gets the content between quotes at a set index value)
        function GetQuote(Input:String, Index:Number):String {
            return String(Input.substr(Input.indexOf('"', Index), Input.indexOf('"', Index + 1)));
        }

The return for GetQuote(MyText,0) is “text-align yet i need text-align:center;line-height:150% instead.

Answer 1

First off, index of the first quote is 11 and both MyString.indexOf('"') and MyString.indexOf('"',1) return the right value (the latter also works because you don’t actually have a quote at the beginning of your string).

When you need to use an single quote inside another one or a double quote inside another one you need to escape the inner one(s) using backslashes. So to catch a single quote you would use it like '\''

There are several ways of stripping a value from a string. You can use the RegExp class or use standard String functions like indexOf, substr etc.

Now what exactly would you like the result to become? Your question is not obvious.

EDIT:

Using the RegExp class is much easier:

var myText:String = '<div style="text-align:center;line-height:150%"><a href="http://www.website.com/page.htm">';

function getQuote(input:String, index:int=0):String {
// I declared the default index as the first one
    var matches:Array = [];
    // create an array for the matched results
    var rx:RegExp = /"(\\"|[^"])*"/g;
    // create a RegExp rule to catch all grouped chars
    // rule also includes escaped quotes
    input.replace(rx,function(a:*) {
        // if it's "etc." we want etc. only so...
        matches.push(a.substr(1,a.length-2));
    });
    // above method does not replace anything actually.
    // it just cycles in the input value and pushes
    // captured values into the matches array.
    return (index >= matches.length || index < 0) ? '' : matches[index];
}

trace('Index 0 -->',getQuote(myText))
trace('Index 1 -->',getQuote(myText,1))
trace('Index 2 -->',getQuote(myText,2))
trace('Index -1 -->',getQuote(myText,-1))

Outputs:

Index 0 –> text-align:center;line-height:150%
Index 1 –> http://www.website.com/page.htm
Index 2 –>
Index -1 –>