Double Line Breaks in Flash Dynamic Text

This is how i'm setting this up to have it work with the solution i provide: text is written in and submitted through a html textarea with no extra format and stored in a mysql database, with no special treatment, then outputted to flash, with php (used urlencode, which i don't think influences anyway), using LoadVars, without any extra encoding.

To the hour, i have not found out a way to avoid importing text into a flash dynamic text field with the correct line break format and i think there is no way to automatically handle this.

While html textareas work fine with the line break \r\n, treating both \r and \n as one single line break, flash reads the \r\n as two line breaks.

The only solution that appears to exist relies on replacing the line breaking characters, once loaded in flash. You can replace the line breaking characters, \r\n with a single \r or a single \n, or with a html <br> tag (in which case you must format the dynamic text to accept html text - see the example below). You can also replace the characters with the flash constant: newline.

Depending on your OS, you will get different line breaks - for linux or unix they are single \r or \n, as opposed to a windows machine which uses \r\n.

Another matter is that i think the text will always be brought into flash with the line breaks, even if you use the php's nl2br function to automatically replace the line breaks into a html <br> tag, but that's something i did not dwell on more.

Example 1 - Dynamic text field treated as HTML
TextField.html = true;
myRawString = "play rune again\r\nin a couple of years";

//replace \r\n with <br>

myCorrectString = myRawString.split("\r\n").join("<br>");
dynamicTextField.htmlText = myCorrectString;

Example 2 - Regular dynamic text field with \r or \n
myRawString = "play rune again\r\nin a couple of years";

//remove the \n. works the same with removing \r

myCorrectString = myRawString.split("\n").join("");
dynamicTextField.text = myCorrectString;

Example 3 - Regular dynamic text field with flash line breaks
myRawString = "play rune again\r\nin a couple of years";

//replace the \r\n with the flash newline constant

myCorrectString = myRawString.split("\r\n").join(""+newline+"");
dynamicTextField.text = myCorrectString;

The dynamic text field has to be set to multiline for this.

Playing Around With Buttons

First thing: dynamically changing the width of a button symbol, when this guy only has a hit area defined, will un-render the button from the stage. You will have to add content to the Up State of the button to undo this. Solution: add an invisible (alpha) shape to the button's Up State.

Tip on Disabling Buttons

To disable buttons you can use  mcInstanceName.enabled = false; 
This property works on both button symbols and movieclip symbols acting as buttons.

If your button only has it's hit frame defined, or your moviclip serving as a button is  _alpha = 0; , and you wish to enabled another button, which lies underneath use the  _visible property instead;
 mcInstanceName._visible = false;

Also,  you can hide the default button cursor with  mcInstanceName.useHandCursor = false;