ignoreWhite and condenseWhite

Since most of my time programming has been spent doing games and more complex programmatic gamey type interfaces, I’ve missed out on using some of Flash’s more advanced (or not so advanced) text formatting features – until recently. I have always used the ignoreWhite property for imported XML objects, which basically tells the parser that the stuff between XML nodes is not actually node content, but it wasn’t until today that I stumbled on the textField condenseWhite property. I felt both relieved and exasperated. For several years now I have cursed the fact that any stray carriage returns in your imported XML file with text content (that is, the content inside the node or nodeValue) would show up in the text field that you dump the nodeValue content into. However, little did I know that sitting there for quite some time now was condenseWhite, which basically tells the textField to ignore those stray spaces and carriage returns and only use the formatting data provided either by html tags or by xhtml-ish tags with an imported style sheet (which I’ve also had the pleasure of using in a project for the first time). So, in short – textField.condenseWhite is my new best code friend. Well, at least for the day…