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Flash AS3 Basics: Identifiers

Identifiers are the names that you invent to represent or identify elements in the program. Identifiers can be used to name MovieClip instances, Classes, Variables and Functions.

The program comes with many built elements that already have names. These are things like MovieClip methods like gotoAndStop() etc. You should avoid using these names as names for your own elements.

When creating Identifier names you should follow the following rules.

  • Names must begin with a letter (a,b,c etc) the underscore (_) or the dollar sign ($).
  • Names can contain any combination of letters, numbers and the underscore and dollar sign.
  • Avoid using names have already been used by the program.

Conventions

Identifiers are used fro various purposes. Following conventions while creating identifier names will help you keep them all straight.

In general identifiers should be kept lower case.

Class names: Class names always begin with an upper case letter. All of the built in classes follow this convention. For example MovieClip, Sprite and EventDispatcher all start with an uppercase letter.

Private Properties: A common convention is to start private properties with an underscore. For example: _index, _width, _height etc. The definitions for these might look like:

private var _index:uint;
private var _width:Number;
private var _height:Number;

Actionscript Basics: Identifiers

What are Identifiers?

When you are writing your code many of the elements are predefined. That is the words you are using have already been defined. Other elements you must create are defined by you. That is you get to make up the name assigned to these elements. Movieclip Instance names, Function names, Class names and Variable names are defined by you. That is you make up the names for yourself. All of these names are Identifiers.

When naming an Identifier you must follow a few simple rules.

  • The name must begin with a non numeric character
  • The name can not contain spaces or special characters. The _ (underscore) and $ (dollar sign) are exceptions to this rule

Foe example the following names work as identifiers:

  • _index
  • gallery
  • gallery_mc
  • ButtonAnimator

The following would not work as identifiers for various reasons:

  • 5_button – begins with a number
  • button 5 – contains a space
  • button*5 – contains a special character (*)

Descriptive names

Using names that describe the use of the element being named is a good idea. This creates code that reads well comments itself.

Good naming should be balanced by creating names that are not too long and don’t encourage spelling errors.

Name Extensions

Adobe suggests the use of extensions at the end of Identifier names. These extensions help label your Identifiers as being of a particular type. They also work with the code editor in Flash to give targeted code hints. All of the extensions begin with the _ followed by a few letters. Here’s a list of extensions, each is followed by the type it represents:

  • _mc – MovieClip
  • _sprite – Sprite
  • _txt – TextField
  • _str – String
  • _array – Array

Example Identifiers

Here are a few names that might used for identifiers:

  • home_mc – instance of a movie clip on the stage, maybe the button labeled Home
  • icons_sprite – instance name of a sprite containing icons
  • button_array – an array containing a list of buttons

PHP Basics: Functions

Functions in PHP

PHP allows you to write functions similarly to the way functions are written in other languages. Functions in PHP provide the same advantages that they provide in other languages also. Functions provide a way to encapsulate a block of code so it can be reused as often as needed. This allows you to avoid rewriting the same blocks of code over again. Which makes your job easier by writing less code. This also keeps your from having to write similar or the same block of code more than once.

Continue reading PHP Basics: Functions

PHP MySQL and Special Characters

You may find that you have a problem with special characters not displaying or showing up as a small black diamond with a ? in the center. Here’s a quick fix seems to work well.

These would be characters like: <, > and &. It also includes characters like: é,?, ø and the curly quotation marks.

At the point you are printing these characters into a page you’ll want to run them through the php htmlentities function. Here’s an example:

htmlentities( $str, ENT_COMPAT, 'Windows-1252' );

Where $str would be any string you wanted to convert to compatible characters.

For more info: http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.htmlentities.php