Erik Liddell

Erik Liddell is an interactive designer based out of Boston MA. He graduated from The School of The Museum of Fine Arts Boston where he focused in Experimental Film and Multi-Media Design.

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When your computer calls a file like a PDF to your default browser it does so with a command that looks something like this: 

yourBrowser -url "file:///c:your.pdf


When using getUrl();  to say:
getUrl("your.pdf","_blank", "GET");
flash actually posts a command like this:

yourBrowser -url "file:///c|your.pdf

Note the Red. Flash changes the ":" to a "|"

Now for what ever reason, IE automaticly interperets them both as a semi colon or ":" But Firefox seems to interperet the "|" as a new tab. 

So what do we do?  Well we are going to create our own URL, convert it to a string and replace the "|" with a ":"

The first step of this is to find out the directory our SWF resides in and turn that into a variable.

var swfDir:String = _root._url;


next we find the last slash in that string:

var lastSlash:Number = swfDir.lastIndexOf("/");


then we find the pipe or "|":

var colonSpot:Number = swfDir.indexOf("|");


Now we are going to create and empty string and piece all that stuff together replacing the "|" with a ":".

var myUrl:String;
if(colonSpot>=0){
/*that means if we found a "|" if we didn't the colonSpot value would be -1*/
myUrl = swfDir.substring(0,colonSpot);
/*that makes our Url var = everything BEFORE the "|"*/
myUrl +=":"
/* that ads the ":" */
}else{
myUrl="";
}
myUrl+= swfDir.substring(conolSpot+1, lastSlash+1);
/* now we just added back everything after the | */


ok Now we write our getUrl() with our new variable "myUrl"

AS 2.0

myButton.onRelease = function()
{
    var targetUrl:String = myUrl + "yourfile.pdf";
    getURL(targetUrl, "_blank");
};



AS 3.0

function newGetUrl(event:MouseEvent):void{
var targetUrl:URLRequest = new URLRequest(myUrl + "myfile.pdf");
navigateToURL(targetUrl, "_blank");
}
myButton.addEventListener(MouseEvent.CLICK, newGetUrl);



That’s it, another bug work around.