Flash CS3 Documentation

Learning ActionScript 2.0 in Adobe Flash > Data and Data Types > About data types > About primitive and complex data types > String data type

String data type

A string is a sequence of characters such as letters, numbers, and punctuation marks. You enter strings in an ActionScript statement by enclosing them in single (') or double (") quotation marks.

A common way that you use the string type is to assign a string to a variable. For example, in the following statement, "L7" is a string assigned to the variable favoriteBand_str:

var favoriteBand_str:String = "L7";

You can use the addition (+) operator to concatenate, or join, two strings. ActionScript treats spaces at the beginning or end of a string as a literal part of the string. The following expression includes a space after the comma:

var greeting_str:String = "Welcome, " + firstName;

To include a quotation mark in a string, precede it with a backslash character (\). This is called escaping a character. There are other characters that cannot be represented in ActionScript except by special escape sequences. The following table lists all the ActionScript escape characters:

Strings in ActionScript are immutable, just as they are in Java. Any operation that modifies a string returns a new string.

The String class is a built-in ActionScript class. For information on the methods and properties of the String class, see the String entry in the ActionScript 2.0 Language Reference.

Flash CS3