capital H coder

I recently got down to the “Support Foreign Characters” item in my Knowtes To-Do list, and figured it would be fairly easy to find an example component out there that provided an easy way for users to enter special characters into Flex text controls (TextInput, TextArea, and RichTextEditor).

Unfortunately, both my posts to FlexCoders and my lengthy Google search turned up empty.

So on the off chance that I’m not actually the only person in the world with a need for this type of feature, here is what I came up with (a very simple version of it anyway):

And HERE IS THE SOURCE

Two points worth mentioning:

• The key for getting the unicode characters into the text controls was to use the String.fromCharCode() function.
• To enhance usability, the cursor is placed at the end of the text in the associated control when the character dropdown is closed. The selectionBeginIndex and selectionEndIndex are used for setting the caret position. For the RichTextEditor this property changes to selection.beginIndex and selection.endIndex.

It definitely needs some polishing, but hopefully it will give someone a jump start on providing a simple method of allowing users to easily enter unicode/foreign/special characters in Flex apps.

~Shaun