User Guide

34 Chapter 2: ActionScript Language Reference

% (modulo)

Availability

Flash Player 4. In Flash 4 files, the % operator is expanded in the SWF file as x - int(x/y) * y

and may not be as fast or as accurate in later versions of Flash Player.

Usage

expression1 % expression2

Parameters

None.

Returns

A number.

Description

Operator (arithmetic); calculates the remainder of expression1 divided by expression2. If

either of the

expression parameters are non-numeric, the modulo (%) operator attempts to

convert them to numbers. The

expression can be a number or string that converts to a numeric

value. For more information, see “Automatic data typing” and “Operator precedence and

associativity” in Using ActionScript in Flash.

Example

The following numeric example uses the modulo (%) operator:

trace(12%5); // traces 2

trace(4.3%2.1); // traces 0.0999999999999996

trace(4%4); // traces 0

The first trace returns 2, rather than 12/5 or 2.4, because the modulo (%) operator returns only

the remainder. The second trace returns 0.0999999999999996 instead of the expected 0.1

because of the limitations of floating-point accuracy in binary computing.