Actionscript 3.0

AS3 Quick Tips: String to Number Conversion (and vice versa)

By Bill Nunney ⋅ September 16, 2008 ⋅  Print This Post ⋅ Post a comment

Hello and welcome to the start of a new line of AS3 articles, focusing on being very short and to the point. so anyway i was walking down the road and i caught the glimps of a penny on the floor, so i went to pick it up and accidently fell into an alternate dimention where i met a rather large yellow creature proclaiming to be the king of AS3. So i just said stage.removeChild(Monster_mc); and he was defeated…

…then i wrote this tutorial.

OK so, why would you want to convert a String to a Number and vice versa? Well it could be for a whole range of reasons though mainly if flash spits out this message:

“1067: Implicit coercion of a value of type String to an unrelated type Number.”

You mostly get this if you’ve tried to run a numerical calculation on a string, which just dosen’t work. However hope is not lost! you can use two of AS3’s handy functions to convert them on the fly!
Say i have these two variables, one a String, the other a Number.

var myString:String = "123";
var myNumber:Number = 42;

Now say you want to add them together.

var myCalc:Number = myNumber + myString;
trace(myCalc);

If you ran that calculation you’d get the error mentioned above. However if you convert the ‘myString’ varible to a Number the calculation will run perfectly.

var myCalc:Number = myNumber + Number(myString);
trace(myCalc);

this will now output 165 in the output window.

if you do the same but convert the Number to a string like so…

(remember to change the var ‘myCalc’ to a String)

var myCalc:String = String(myNumber) + myString;
trace(myCalc);

Flash will output 42123 as it would if you were adding to a string.

Well thats it, if you think i’ve missed something please leave a comment

Related Wuup Stuff:

• 11 September, 2008 -- AS3 Basics: Using the Microphone in Actionscript 3.0
• 22 July, 2008 -- AS3 Basics: String Manipulation in Actionscript 3.0
• 21 November, 2008 -- AS3 Quick Tips: Publishing HTML with the Root Path as the SWF Directory
• 3 November, 2008 -- AS3 Basics: Sending Variables from AS3 to PHP
• 14 November, 2008 -- AS3 Math Basics: Add Velocity Physics to a Movie Clip

Tags: 3.0, actionscript, AS3, flash