ActionScript: The Definitive Guide

The String Type

String is the datatype used for textual data (letters, punctuation marks, and other characters). A string literal is any combination of characters enclosed in quotation marks:

"asdfksldfsdfeoif"  // A frustrated string
"greetings"         // A friendly string
"[e-mail]"   // A self-promotional string
"123"               // It may look like a number, but it's a string
'singles'           // Single quotes are acceptable too

Before we see how to form string literals, let’s examine which characters are permitted in strings.

Character Encoding

Like all computer data, text characters are stored internally using a numeric code. They are encoded for storage and decoded for display using a character set, which maps (i.e., relates) characters to their numeric codes. Character sets vary for different languages and alphabets. Older Western applications use some derivative of ASCII, a standard character set that includes only 128 characters—the English alphabet, numbers, and basic punctuation marks. Modern applications support a family of character sets known collectively as ISO-8859. Each of the ISO-8859 character sets encodes the standard Latin alphabet (`A’ to `Z') plus a varying set of letters needed in the target languages. ActionScript uses ISO-8859-1, also known as Latin 1, as its primary character map.

The Latin 1 character set accommodates most Western European languages—French, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and so on—but not languages such as Greek, Turkish, Slavic, and Russian. Unicode ...