Question

What is the regular expression to find the first newline (\n) in a text (used to find and delete the newline)? I’m using the regular expression in ActionScript and tried

ta.text = ta.text.replace(/\n*/,'') 

but it doesn’t seem to work

Thanks

Answer 1

Just tested this and it worked for me:

ta.text = ta.text.replace("\n",'');

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My actual code was (cut and pasted):

var testString:String = "Hello\nWorld";
trace(testString);
testString = testString.replace("\n", '');
trace(testString);

Which yeilded the output:

Hello
World
HelloWorld

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Alternatively, you can define a pattern along the lines of what you were attempting:

var pattern:RegExp = /AB\*C/;

And that works as well. The modified code would become:

var pattern:RegExp = /\n/;
var testString:String = "Hello\nWorld";
trace(testString);
testString = testString.replace(pattern, '');
trace(testString);

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Note that the code above only replaces the first instance of a newline character (as you requested). Doing more would require either a recursive call to the replace function or a more sophisticated RegExp.

I hope that helps in some way,

–gMale

EDIT: given the comment discussion below, try working with one of these events, instead:

• change Dispatched when text in the TextArea control changes through user input.
• dataChange Dispatched when the data property changes.
• textInput Dispatched when the user types, deletes, or pastes text into the control.