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 - beta out now.
Thanks for transform it to AS3. It works very well but don’t support htmlText. The Style Information always reseted.
Hi Daniel,
You’re right – the current version doesn’t support editing textfields with HTML content, it only works on the .text property of a field.
Support for editing HTML might be something I’ll look into but I have no need / time for it right now.
If you want to have a dabble, I think the trick will be calculating the html equivalent of the caretIndex after an insert – the position of the insert in the .htmlText
If anyone does want to add any features to the code we could upload it to google code – leave a comment to let us know.
This was annoying me for at least an hour. Thanks!!
Looks like this may finally be solved in 10.1 later this year…
http://bugs.adobe.com/jira/browse/FP-501
What to do to use it on Flex?
It’ll be just the same as any other situation, include the JSTextReader class in your project and initialise it with a reference to the Flash stage.
JSTextReader.getInstance().init(stage);
That’s it. It will intercept change events in input TextFields and make sure the right characters are displayed (by checking them against JavaScript key events).
Hi there to all,
I try this solution but it don’t work on safari, is there any workaround??
Not worked ar Opera browser at all. It does not recieving 2-bytes characters in his flash-plugin. There are always 1-character… sadly…
You could try out the beta of Flash Player 10.1 – which fixes various long-standing issues with the player, including this one.
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer10/