HTML Characters in XML

I’ve been doing some work with XML in AS3 and needing to have the XML contain HTML characters for an htmltext field in Flash – for links and lists etc.

Few ways to approach that:

<![CDATA[
"Rampant <'s and &'s in the XML fields that XML ignores due to special CDATA tags within the fields"
]]>

Or you could do all your html formatting in the XML with [‘s instead for example, then in Flash, change them to <‘s before firing it out. There are a million tidier ways to do this but this old function does that job:

function replaceSpecialCharracters(stringToBeReplaced:String)
{
  // pushing this string into the array one character at a time
  var stringArray:Array = new Array();
  for(var i:uint = 0;i<stringToBeReplaced.length; i++) {
    stringArray.push(stringToBeReplaced.charAt(i));
  }
  // once array filled, stripping ['s for <'s and dumping them in to replacementString
  var replacementString:String = "";
  for(i = 0;i<stringArray.length; i++) {
    if(stringArray[i] == "[") {
      stringArray[i] = "<";
    } else if (stringArray[i] == "]") {
      stringArray[i] = ">";
    } else if (stringArray[i] == "") { // damn horizontal tabs!
      stringArray[i] = "";
    }
    replacementString += stringArray[i];
  }
  return replacementString;
}

Infact this way is much better

myText = myText.split("[").join("]");