Xml Para Actionscript

11/6/12

» AS3 E4X Rundown dis patc hEvent()™

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M A Y 21 2007

1 27 C O M M ENT S

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

A S3 E 4X R UN D OW N
b y R o g e r B ra u n s t e i n

BY ROGER BRAUNSTEIN
AS3, GREATEST H ITS,
PROGRAM M ING

V iew t h is art icle in ot h er lan g uag es:
Ch in ese t ran slat ion b y Wei Gao

I’ve been using E4X in A c tionS c ript 3.0 for a while now and the rumors of its simplic ity have been greatly exaggerated. A
lot of operations areeasy and make sense, but others are less… obvious. E4X is essentially a whole new language
whic h is part of the A S 3 grammar, just as regular expressions have their own c ompletely differentlanguage but exist
within A c tionS c ript 3.0. A nd being so new, there really isn’t a whole lot of doc umentation out there. This is further
c omplic ated by the fac t that sinc e E4X seems simple enoughat first glanc e to explain in a few lines, a lot of
doc umentation stops short.
A nyway. I’ve been infuriated by E4X more than a few times now, and I’d like to start a running post to demystifysome of
it. Please! use the c omments to ask any questions you might have, and I’ll keep adding to this post. Hopefully this c an
turn into a dec ent resourc e for E4X lore. The fun begins after the cut.
For the following post, let’s use this XML bloc k as an example:
vrteepeXL=

ae2
aaTh Wsems
ae2
aaTa u
c omposed of zero or more root nodes, like:
7/g>
ae2
ae2
ae
node is itself asingle root node. It’s important to note that an XMLList c an also have one (like XML) or zero nodes.
A nyway, most of the basic operations for E4X are filtering operations. You take the XML and findsome subset of the
XML. Often, you want to find a partic ular node. A ny filtering you do is going to result in a number of possible nodes, so
you will notic e soon that XML always turns into...