Actionscript Cookbook

9.3. Inserting Special Whitespace Characters

Problem

You want to add whitespace characters such as tabs or newline characters to your string.

Solution

Use the escape sequences for the special characters.

Discussion

There are five special whitespace characters with escape sequences, as shown in Table 9-1.

Table 9-1. Whitespace escape sequences

Whitespace character	Escape sequence
Newline	\n
Tab	\t
Backspace	\b
Form feed	\f
Carriage return	\r

You can use these escape sequences within a string. They are most useful when displaying a string value in a text field:

// Results in a string value: these    words    are    separated    by    tabs
myString = "these\twords\tare\tseparated\tby\ttabs";

/* Results in a string value:
these
words
are
separated
by
newlines
*/
myString = "these\nwords\nare\nseparated\nby\nnewlines";

ActionScript also provides a constant, newline, which can be used in place of the \n escape sequence. The result is the same:

/* Results in a string value:
two
lines
*/
myString = "two" + newline + "lines";

Within Flash, the newline, form feed, and carriage return characters all result in the same display. However, when you load content into Flash from external sources, some values will have newline characters, some will have form feeds, and some will have carriage returns.