When @ becomes “
Flash Player - text input problems
Ever been vexed when Flash seems to think you're using a US keyboard layout, only when it's embedded in a page?
We came across the issue while building sites that require users to input an email address; when using Firefox, the @ character arrived in Flash as a " quote mark. After a little more testing it turned out, regardless of your setup, a transparent Flash movie in Firefox will always receive keyboard input as if from a US keyboard.
So (here in the UK) our @ and " characters get swapped around. Indeed, it seems that Flash embedded on a page with the wmode parameter set to transparent has been giving Flash developers headaches with text input for many a moon.
It's not just the Firefox @ mix-up either, but rather than me reiterating the specific issues, why not read about them and get a handy ActionScript 2 / JavaScript workaround here.
But Mike, why are you telling us this?
Well, I recently needed an AS3 solution to the problem, and converted astgtciv's AS2 version to meet my needs.
So here it is, released under a Creative Commons licence (as was the original)
Try it / Get it
Update 22/04/09 :
It seems that Adobe are aware of the issue, but as yet there's no official solution.
Update 11/12/09 :
This has apparently been fixed in Flash Player 10.1 - out now.
