ActionScript: The Definitive Guide

Name

escape( ) Global Function — encode a string for safe network transfer

Availability

Flash 5

Synopsis

escape(string)

Arguments

string

A string (or an expression that yields a string) to be encoded.

Returns

An (almost) URL-encoded version of string.

Description

The escape( ) function creates a new encoded string based on a supplied string. The new string contains a hexadecimal escape sequence in place of any character in the supplied string that is not a digit or a basic, unaccented Latin letter between A and Z or a and z. The replacement hexadecimal escape sequences take the format %xx, where xx is the hexadecimal value of the character’s code point in the Latin 1 character set. Shift-JIS double-byte characters are converted to two hexadecimal escape sequences of the form %xx%xx.

The escape( ) function effectively URL-encodes a string, except that space characters are converted to %20, not +. escape( ) is sometimes used when a Flash movie sends information to server applications or writes cookies in a browser.

To decode an encoded string, we use the global unescape( ) function.

Example

var phoneNumber = "[phone]"
escape(phoneNumber);  // yields %28222%29%20515%2D1212

See Also

unescape( ); Appendix B