User Guide

About data types 19
String data type
A string is a sequence of characters such as letters, numbers, and punctuation marks. You enter
strings in an ActionScript statement by enclosing them in single (') or double (") quotation
marks.
A common way that you use the string type is to assign a string to a variable. For example, in the
following statement,
"L7" is a string assigned to the variable favoriteBand_str:
var favoriteBand_str:String = "L7";
You can use the addition (+) operator to concatenate, or join, two strings. ActionScript treats
spaces at the beginning or end of a string as a literal part of the string. The following expression
includes a space after the comma:
var greeting_str:String = "Welcome, " + firstName;
To include a quotation mark in a string, precede it with a backslash character (\). This is called
escaping a character. There are other characters that cannot be represented in ActionScript except
by special escape sequences. The following table provides all the ActionScript escape characters:
Strings in ActionScript are immutable, the same as Java. Any operation that modifies a string
returns a new string.
The String class is a built-in ActionScript class.
Number data type
The number data type is a double-precision floating-point number. The minimum value of a
number object is approximately 5e-324. The maximum is approximately 1.79E+308.
You can manipulate numbers using the arithmetic operators addition (
+), subtraction (-),
multiplication (
*), division (/), modulo (%), increment (++), and decrement (--). For more
information, see “Numeric operators” on page 33.
Escape sequence Character
\b
Backspace character (ASCII 8)
\f
Form-feed character (ASCII 12)
\n
Line-feed character (ASCII 10)
\r
Carriage return character (ASCII 13)
\t
Tab character (ASCII 9)
\"
Double quotation mark
\'
Single quotation mark
\\
Backslash
\000 - \377
A byte specified in octal
\x00 - \xFF
A byte specified in hexadecimal
\u0000 - \uFFFF
A 16-bit Unicode character specified in hexadecimal