FlashICT.net

I make a great deal of use of the ‘escape’ and ‘unescape’ commands within Flash. To find out more you can read the relevant Flash online documentation.

When working with data saving and loading tasks, such as with the Interactive Storyboard developments but more specifically with my ContentGenerator.net applications, I use them to enable special characters such as é â ä à to work in my games and applications. This has been a great solution to entend the potential use of my applications.

For those that aren’t aware, ‘escape’ urlencodes any text. For example, this would turn “hello + world” into “hello%20%2B%20world”. This can be saved much more easily as a text file. When the file is then loaded again, you ‘un-urlencode’ the text using ‘unescape’ which is meant to turn “hello%20%2B%20world” back into “hello + world”.

However, I’m encountering a rather strange issue. My applications seems to ‘lose’ any + signs. When a user types a + sign into a question - as many Maths teachers do - they generate correctly in the finished games, but they don’t save correctly to the .txt file.

Strange thing is when I experiment with a simple escape, unescape example in flash it works perfectly - picks up the + sign, urlencodes it correctly to %2B. Thus at the moment I’m a bit stuck! :(. Something must be going wrong when the files are saved and loaded. If I add ” 2B” (i.e. space followed by 2B) in my application, it does save and is then loaded as a “+” sign. Yet when that saves, it goes wrong.