UPDATE:
I managed to forget TextField.condenseWhite = true!
Now, although that will handle 90% of your XML -> HTML whitespace issues. There are a few scenarios where the hints in this series come in handy:
You want more control over XML -> HTML tag handling. For instance you want to avoid an extraneous wrapping tag.
The CharacterEntity class is still relevant and useful.
You're using TextField.styleSheet. If you're not using a stylesheet, you can set the htmlText and then access the html with collapsed whitespace by reading the htmlText property back. If you do use a stylesheet, sniffing TextField.htmlText won't show collapsed whitespace).
We often, pull our dynamic content into Flash via XML. A Lot. As in pretty much exclusively. Sometimes, we'll have honest-to-goodness information architecture to carve up that data semantically. We end up with a structured tree of simple text nodes. The XML parsing routine figures out how to turn this into a view. Great for all kinds of reasons. But sometimes, we just want to treat a node as a block of HTML and pass it into the htmlText property of a TextField.
This is unnecessarily hard. Neither XML.toString() nor XML.toXMLString() do what you want for this case. But the following function will:
private function getHTMLContent (xmlString:String):String
{
var html = ""
var prettyPrint = XML.prettyPrinting
XML.prettyPrinting = false
var ignoreWhite = XML.ignoreWhitespace
XML.ignoreWhitespace = true
var xml:XML = new XML (xmlString)
var children = xml.children()
if (children.length())
{
for each (var i in children)
{
html += i.toXMLString()
}
}
else
{
html += xml
}
XML.prettyPrinting = prettyPrint
XML.ignoreWhitespace = ignoreWhite
return html
}
To use it, pass the XML node containing the HTML, and the function will return the appropriate HTML String. Let's say your XML looks like:
<services>
<description>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit.<br /><br />Aliquam in lectus quis nisl lacinia dignissim.
<ul>
<li>Proin viverra.</li>
<li>Phasellus tristique.</li>
</ul>
</description>
</services>
Then, after loading the XML document, you'd do something like:
var desc = getHTMLContent(myXML.description)
content_tf.condenseWhite = true
content_tf.htmlText = desc
If you skip this step, you'll end up including the description node (which isn't what you want) or mangling the mixed-content nature (omitting the br tags or the parent-less "Lorem ipsum" opening sentence or something equally as wrong). The script should also works if your content is a straight-forward text node.
The prettyPrint and ignoreWhitespace stuff keeps your whitespace from wreaking havok with Flash's HTML format (which is different from a browser in that it'll happily add extra newlines when they appear in the source).
Next time, I'll incorporate Rob's entity decoding script since Flash's built-in entity support is pretty lacking.
