ActionScript for Flash MX: The Definitive Guide, Second Edition

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Copyright © 2007 O’Reilly & Associates, Inc. All rights reserved.

Working with Strings

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89

Joining Strings Together

Joining strings together (creating a new string from two or more strings) is called

concatenation. As we’ve seen, we can concatenate two strings with the plus operator

(

+), like this:

"Macromedia" + "Flash"

This line of code yields the single string value “MacromediaFlash”. Oops! We forgot

to put a space between the words. To add the space, we can insert it within the

quotes that define one of the strings, such as:

"Macromedia " + "Flash" // Yields "Macromedia Flash"

But that’s not always practical. In most cases, we don’t want to add a space to a

company or a product name. So instead, we join three strings together, the middle

one of which is simply an empty space:

"Macromedia" + " " + "Flash" // Also yields "Macromedia Flash"

Note that the space character is not the same as the empty string we discussed ear-

lier, because the empty string has no characters between the quotes.

Ordinarily, you wouldn’t concatenate literal strings, because you could more easily

write the result as one string—“Macromedia Flash”—in the first place. As a more

realistic example, we can concatenate variables that contain string data. Consider the

following code:

var company = "Macromedia";

var product = "Flash";

// Set the variable sectionTitle to "Macromedia Flash" ...