Dynamic Flash

I’ve been using regular expressions for quite a while now, and had basically tought myself how to use them by trial and error. I thought that I had most of the standard (as in non-proprietary) features licked, so much so that I was able to write a highly praised chapter about them in my Foundation PHP for Flash book.

However, for the ASDocGen project I needed to parse code with regular expressions, and that presented quite a challenge. After a while it became clear to me that either regular expressions weren’t going to be powerful enough for what I wanted to do, or maybe there was something I was missing, so I decided to buy myself a copy of Mastering Regular Expressions.

This book is pretty much the de-facto book on regular expression development, and the first three chapters tought me a bit about regular expressions that I’d missed when teaching myself. However, the real kicker for me came when reading the fourth chapter, which attempts to demystify the internal workings of regular expression engines. On the face of it, the chapter sounds really boring, but I found that once I understood how the various engine types work, I was able to see exactly where my old expressions has been letting me down.

Once of the additional chapters for the 2nd edition is the chapter on regular expressions in .NET, and opened my eyes to a technique that really made parsing code a lot easier – matching nested constructs. This allows you to match balanced nested patters, such as code blocks enlosed in braces, something that is impossible to do with normal regular expressions. This chapter is available for download from the O’Reilly site if you want to see this for yourself. Just a bit of a shame for me that the code for this chapter was in VB.NET, but it’s not that hard to translate the code into C# or JScript.NET if you’re after something a little more modern.

I’d recommend this book to anyone and everyone working with regular expressions – I certainly learned a lot from it and it was well worth its low price tag!

Since I trashed the old blog that was here, I though that I’d better post some links to some of the stuff that you might find useful.

• BoardMX This is the upgraded version of my Flash/PHP/MySQL based message board (based on but completely rewritten from the one featured in my Foundation PHP for Flash book). There are two versions here – boardmx.zip uses the FFF Star font in the interface, but since this is a commercial font I also made BoardMX Harmony which uses the free FFF Harmony font. This is a Flash 6 project.
• Homebrew JSFL reference Before Macromedia released the official JSFL reference, I used an XSLT stylesheet to turn the Flash MX 2004 Help files for the JSFL commands into an HTML reference with a PDF version too. You can download the whole package, including the XSL stylesheet here.

that appears to be it. There used to be a lot more useful stuff here, but it’s all pretty much out of date now so I haven’t bothered to resurrect the files. If there’s something you were looking for but couldn ‘t find, let me know and I’ll see if I can dig it out.

Just wanted to say thanks to Mike and all the guys at Macromedia. It seems that I’m one of the lucky ones to receive the goody box, and thankfully I didn’t have to pay any customs fees on it like some other people in the community have.

Just in case you’ve not seen any of the other posts on this, the goody box contained…

• Timbuk2 laptop courier bag with Macromedia Flash MX 2004 logo embroidered on the front – just the right size for my slightly ageing Vaio.
• Cool Macromedia shirt – I got the ‘Tweener’ one rather than the ‘Goto and Play’ that others seem to have received, but I’m not picky!
• 2 packs of MX 2004 component collectable cards – very handy reference for component methods, properties and events.
• Flash MX 2004 video booklet – food for thought here.
• An article on the importance of the recent Flash MX 2004 7.2 Ellipsis Updater
• A letter from Mike thanking me for my contribution to the community

The letter from Mike that accompanied the goodies said that the gifts were a thank you for those active in the community, and I just wanted to say that it’s been a pleasure. I still get so much fun out of using Flash that my job hardly feels like work at all, and I’m happy to give back to the community where I can.

Anyway, thanks again guys ‘n’ gals – looking forward to 8ball!

Okay, I’ve trashed all the old posts and comments because this place, through my neglect, become a haven for blog spammers. I’ve now upgraded to WordPress 1.2 with built in spam filter, so hopefully this shouldn’t happen again.

I’m hoping to build this place up over the next few weeks into something more useful, but for now this is all!