What is the regular expression (used in actionscript) to find the first newline (\n) in a text?

Question

What is the regular expression to find the first newline (\n) in a text (used to find and delete the newline)? I'm using the regular expression in ActionScript and tried

ta.text = ta.text.replace(/\n*/,'') 

but it doesn't seem to work

Thanks

Answer 1

Just tested this and it worked for me:

ta.text = ta.text.replace("\n",'');

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My actual code was (cut and pasted):

var testString:String = "Hello\nWorld";
trace(testString);
testString = testString.replace("\n", '');
trace(testString);

Which yeilded the output:

Hello
World
HelloWorld

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Alternatively, you can define a pattern along the lines of what you were attempting:

var pattern:RegExp = /AB\*C/;

And that works as well. The modified code would become:

var pattern:RegExp = /\n/;
var testString:String = "Hello\nWorld";
trace(testString);
testString = testString.replace(pattern, '');
trace(testString);

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Note that the code above only replaces the first instance of a newline character (as you requested). Doing more would require either a recursive call to the replace function or a more sophisticated RegExp.

I hope that helps in some way,

--gMale

EDIT: given the comment discussion below, try working with one of these events, instead:

• change Dispatched when text in the TextArea control changes through user input.
• dataChange Dispatched when the data property changes.
• textInput Dispatched when the user types, deletes, or pastes text into the control.

Answer 2

You're using the regular expression \n* which matches the first occurrence of zero (!) or more line feed characters. The first match of this regex is thus always at the very start of the string. If the string starts with line feed characters, those will be matched. If the string starts with something else, the zero-length string at the start of the regex will be matched.

Use \n to match the first line feed character. Use \n+ to match the fist sequence of line feed characters. Use [\r\n]+ to match the first sequence of line breaks, regardless of the line break style used (LF only, CRLF, etc.). Use \r?\n to match a single line break as either LF only or CRLF.

In your ActionScript code, use two slashes to delimit the regex you want to use:

ta.text = ta.text.replace(/[\r\n]+/,'');