Hi Jay,

Just wanted to say thanks for that tutorial, it was really helpful

However for some reason I could only get the first variable (the username). This seemed strange so I did some debugging with *trace(evt.target.data)* and it showed this string

*username=John Doe&email=johndoe@example.com

*The *&e *seemed very suspicious, for one because the normal html entity for ampersand is &
In any case, it seemed like Flash had issues with those symbols being there.

For people encountering the problem, the solution seems to be:

Replace the line *$returnString = http_build_query($returnVars);*

with *$returnString = http_build_query($returnVars, ”, ‘&’); *

To be honest I don’t understand why this works, but being explicit to PHP about using the & sign as the argument separator seemed to have solved the problem – although this should be completely unnecessary.

Probably a bug in PHP?

Yen

This tutorial shows you how to load external data from php scripts using the URLLoader class, as well as how to handle the load completed event. It will help you get started using PHP and ActionScript 3.0 together….

I had a similar problem once, I think it had to do with putting the ampersand in front of the return string.

My advice is to try both methods:

1) to echo “&firstValue&secondValue”

and

2) to echo “firstValue&secondValue”

One of these is right, and one is wrong, I’m not sure which. It’s a flash quirk I believe. (One of many).

$returnVars = “username=John Doe”;
$returnVars .= “&email=hotmail.com”;
echo $returnVars;

No problem. However if you put the ampersand in the first name value pairing as follows:

The following error occurs in flash:

Error: Error #2101: The String passed to URLVariables.decode() must be a URL-encoded query string containing name/value pairs.
at Error$/throwError()
at flash.net::URLVariables/decode()
at flash.net::URLVariables()
at Fetch_fla::MainTimeline/handleComplete()
at flash.events::EventDispatcher/dispatchEventFunction()
at flash.events::EventDispatcher/dispatchEvent()
at flash.net::URLLoader/onComplete()

If you examine the output of the example there is no ampersand on the first variable so flash should trace out both variables but I always get undefined for the second one.

Any one know why? Has anyone found a solution? I am running php 5.2.4 so there should be no problem with the php. I am going crazy. I can’t say if you help me that I will love you for ever but you would make a grown man cry.

Thanks for any help.

imailjim@gmail.com

Jim

Thanks again!

I was getting the same problem – turned out that I had php 4.x on my hosting and the http_build_query isn’t in that version, so the output was throwing an error in php that confused the hell out of flash…

Change loader.dataFormat = URLLoaderDataFormat.VARIABLES;

To // loader.dataFormat = URLLoaderDataFormat.VARIABLES;

And put trace(evt.target.data); into the completeHandler and you will be able to see the output from the php file (or you could look at the php file in a web browser)…

It’s working fine now the PHP has been upgraded, but didn’t seem to get it working in other ways…

Hope this helps

PS: Also had a problem where the PHP output file was being cached – watch out for that when making changes…

Nice tutorial. Have you created part 2 yet? Im very interested in learning how to interact with php/mysql/xml and Flash.