Weird inexplicable Flash text behavior. Help!

Question

I've been searching high and low for an answer to this and
this is the first time I've posted to a flash forum as I've got
nowhere so far.
I've been building a few sites in flash that rely heavily on
loading plain text files into the swf file (for the purpose of
quick and easy text updating) using the commonly used LoadVars
script (see end of post for an example script).
And normally this works absolutely fine - but then sometimes
something weird starts happening after I've re-edited a text file
and uploaded it.
Here is example text content using 'news' as my load variable
in a text file.
news=
Testing. Testing.
123.
Testing.
It works!
Normally this should appear like this in the flash movie when
using the script that you can see below:
Testing. Testing.
123.
Testing.
It works!
Right?
Yes! And it indeed does.
Except, why is it that at some stage after I've edited and
re-saved/uploaded the text file lets say for example to:
news=
Testing. Testing. Testing.
1234.
Testing.
Please work!
...do I then get this?
Testing. Testing. Testing.
1234.
Testing.
Please work!
Extra blank lines suddenly appear in between the lines of
text - as if invisible BR tags are suddenly added.
There is no difference in the nature of the text file - just
a bit of text editing. If i go back to the original text - i still
get the extra blank lines - unless I upload a copy of the original
(untarnished) text file. This inexplicable behavior is not
predictable - it might be many times that I've edited and uploaded
a text file before I then start seeing this - and I've used
different three or four different text editors - as well as online
browser based text editors such as that found in net2ftp.com.
In addition to this - I only see this behavior in a browser
when viewing the site online, but when viewing the site offline
locally, these extra blank lines never appear!
What's going on?!
Any helpful info would be greatly appreciated.
Igor.
Here is an example script contained in the flash file that
loads the text file.
var features_lv:LoadVars = new LoadVars();
features_lv.onLoad = onText;
features_lv.load("news.txt");
function onText(success:Boolean) {
if (success) {
news_txt.htmlText = features_lv.news;
} else {
news_txt.text = "unable to load text
file";
var myCSS = new TextField.StyleSheet();
myCSS.load("myStyle.css");
myCSS.onLoad = function() {
news_txt.styleSheet = myCSS;
textLoader();
(The CSS file contains only link behaviors.)
quote:
Text

Answer 1

I've run into this kind of thing myself in the past. It
seemed to revolve around that some text editors place a return
after a line, some place a linebreak, and some place both.
Additionally it would seem that some that place one or the
other don't recognize the other one and so if the file has those it
adds the one it would rather see.
And of course Flash recognizes both a \r and a \n (return and
newline) as a "newline."
I don't really know what to tell you for fixing it. First I
would recommend that you use a text editor that saves a UTF-8
format. Flash seems to have less problems with that format than the
others. You can look through and remove extra \r and \n characters
after loading the vars. And in the end I stopped using LoadVars for
this type of thing and instead went to XML and using a CDATA tag.