Weird Characters in Flash HTML Box

[wdmny]

I have a dynamic textbox that is reading external data, and it is thrown off by certain characters. Since its a front end for a chat, anything could be written and displayed.

The problem is, the opening "<" throws everything past that off, unless it is the start of a tag, and also has a closing tag. The "&" also throws everything after that off. Because of the &, I can't just do an HTML encode on the text (to solve the "<" problem).

Any suggestions here? What I am thinking is just replacing all "<" with "[", all ">" with "]", and all "&" with "+". That is the only thing I can come up with.

Thanks

[flux]

url-encoding your external variables might solve your problems...where does the data come from and how is it delivered to flash? (via server script? XML?)

[wdmny]

Yeah, I am connecting to a server side script. The script reads the variables past to it, then outputs the appropriate data. I will try to do a URL-Encode rather than HTML-Encode and see how that works.

[wdmny]

Unfortunately, that did not work. Flash still recognized the URLEncoded equivalent of the "<" and "&" grrrr.

I would think that someone would have run into this since there are some really advanced flash sites out there.

[appy]

Macromedia Technote

I found this useful technote a while back and I think this might be what you are looking for. It curretly is printed out and stuck about 12 inches away from my monitor 'cos I forget every time!

Hope it helps

[appy]

And another

I'm on a roll

[wdmny]

Appy, that did it! Thank you for posting that link, it was a *great* help.