ActionScript for Flash MX: The Definitive Guide, Second Edition

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Chapter 11: Arrays

Here’s how you might make use of our new search function to check whether or not

“Fritz” is one of the names in our

userNames array, which is an array of authorized

usernames:

if (searchArray(userNames, "Fritz") = = null) {

trace("Sorry, that username wasn't found");

} else {

trace("Welcome to the game.");

}

Now that’s invigorating! This is one of those rewarding moments when all our hard

work comes together in a single system. Seemingly trivial individual operations can

combine to form extremely powerful and flexible programs. Like the letters in the

alphabet or the sequence of base-pairs in a strand of DNA, you can construct any-

thing imaginable from the simple building blocks at your disposal. The remainder of

this chapter explains more about the mechanics of manipulating arrays, including

the use of built-in functions that already perform some common functions for you.

As you encounter needs not met by the built-in functions, consider writing your own

custom functions, such as the searchArray() function in the preceding example.

Named Array Elements

Numbered elements in an array are usually uniform in nature. For example, in an

array of usernames, each element is a single user’s name. But sometimes we’ll want

to store a bunch of related information in an array, ...