I love it.

When it comes to actionscript files, flash has always had odd newlines. For some reason, it has always used \r as it’s newline. Mercurial, beeing a unix tool, likes it’s newlines to be \n. So what better to do, than to make mercurial encode/decode the files for us.

To do that, we can simply add the following to our .hgrc file:

[encode]
*.as = perl -pe 's/\r/\n/g'

[decode]
*.as = perl -pe 's/\r/\n/g'

I don’t really know wether the decode part is necessary, but I like to keep it around (if someone should commit poison).

Let’s for the fun of it say, that we would like to POST the following piece of XML to a PHP script:

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<request command="run-command" />

Now, the way I’d do that in Actionscript 3, is like this:

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var a:XML = <request command="run-command" />;
var r:URLRequest = new URLRequest("http://localhost/service.php");
 
r.data = a;
r.method = URLRequestMethod.POST;
r.contentType = "text/xml";
 
var l:URLLoader = new URLLoader();
l.addEventListener(Event.COMPLETE, function(e:Event) {
    trace("success", l.data);
});
l.addEventListener(IOErrorEvent.IO_ERROR, function(e:Event) {
    trace("failed", e);
});
l.load(r);

But it seems, that older flash players (<= 9,0,45,0) does not call the XML’s toString() or something. The result is, that the URLLoader makes a GET request, which is a bit hard to debug as version 9,0,115,0 does send the XML correctly.

Anyway, the correct way to do it, seems to be to manually call the XML’s .toXMLString() method, like so:

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var a:XML = <request command="run-command" />;
var r:URLRequest = new URLRequest("http://localhost/service.php");
 
r.data = a.toXMLString();
r.method = URLRequestMethod.POST;
r.contentType = "text/xml";
 
var l:URLLoader = new URLLoader();
l.addEventListener(Event.COMPLETE, function(e:Event) {
    trace("success", l.data);
});
l.addEventListener(IOErrorEvent.IO_ERROR, function(e:Event) {
    trace("failed", e);
});
l.load(r);