From AS2 to AS3 what is the equvalent of _root?

actionscript-3 migration actionscript-2
Stein G. Strindhaug picture Stein G. Strindhaug · Nov 20, 2008 · Viewed 8.1k times · Source

I'm trying to learn Actionscript 2 or 3, with AS2 I eventually figured by trial and error that I could get any named instance and modify it using a string with its name using

var theinstance = "titletext"; // actually exctracted from an array
_root[theinstance].htmlText = "New text with <b>HTML!</b>";

but when trying to convert the code to AS3 _root doesn't exist anymore. According to the migration doc it is somehow replaced by flash.display.DisplayObject.stage but apparently this is not how to do it:

flash.display.DisplayObject.stage[theinstance].htmlText = "New text with <b>HTML!</b>";

and neither is this:

flash.display.DisplayObject.stage.getChildByName(theinstance).htmlText = "New text with <b>HTML!</b>";

How do I get a child by name in actionscript 3?

Answer

Iain picture Iain · Nov 20, 2008

Just use either "root" (no underscore) or "stage" depending on exactly what you want to do.

However - Why not just store a reference to the textField in the array instead of a string?

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