Recipe 5.6. Converting a String to an Array

Problem

You have a list of values as a string and you want to parse it into an array of separate elements.

Solution

Use the String.split( ) method.

Discussion

The split( ) method of the String class splits a string containing a list of values into an array. The list must be delimited by a uniform substring. For example, the list Susan,Robert,Paula is comma-delimited.

The split( ) method takes up to two parameters:

delimiter: The substring that is used to delimit the elements of the list. If undefined, the entire list is placed into the first element of the new array.
limit: The maximum number of elements to place into the new array. If undefined, all the elements of the list are placed into the new array.

You can use a space as the delimiter to split a string into an array of words:

var list:String = "Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers";
// Split the string using the space as the delimiter. This puts 
// each word into an element of the new array, words.
var words:Array = list.split(" ");

The split( ) method can be extremely useful when values are loaded into Flash using a URLLoader object or another similar technique for loading data. For example, you might retrieve a list of names as a string from the server such as the following:

names=Michael,Peter,Linda,Gerome,Catherine

You can make it easier to use the names by parsing them into an array using the split( ) method:

// Assume _loader is the URLLoader used to load the data.
var namesData:String = _loader.data;
var names:Array = namesData.split(",");