How can you save out a String into a file in AS3?

Question

I have a string the user has typed and I want to save it into a file on the users harddrive. Can you do that? And if so, how?

Answer 1

Yes you can, with FileReference. This is basically how it's done:

var bytes:ByteArray = new ByteArray();
var fileRef:FileReference=new FileReference();
fileRef.save("fileContent", "fileName");

Doesn't look too hard, does it? And here's a video-tutorial on it too:

http://www.gotoandlearn.com/play?id=76

And the documentation:

http://livedocs.adobe.com/flash/9.0/ActionScriptLangRefV3/

Hope that helps.

Answer 2

Since I had a function to output bytes to a file (because I was doing something with bitmaps), I reused it to output a string as well, like this:

var filename:String = "/Users/me/path/to/file.txt";
var byteArray:ByteArray = new ByteArray();
byteArray.writeUTFBytes(someString);
outFile(filename, byteArray);

private static function outFile(fileName:String, data:ByteArray):void {
    var outFile:File = File.desktopDirectory; // dest folder is desktop
    outFile = outFile.resolvePath(fileName);  // name of file to write
    var outStream:FileStream = new FileStream();
    // open output file stream in WRITE mode
    outStream.open(outFile, FileMode.WRITE);
    // write out the file
    outStream.writeBytes(data, 0, data.length);
    // close it
    outStream.close();
}

Answer 3

In addition, you must have Flash Player 10 and a Flex Gumbo SDK installed in your Flex Builder 3.

You can also have a look the following example: http://blog.flexexamples.com/2008/08/25/saving-files-locally-using-the-filereference-classs-save-method-in-flash-player-10/

Answer 4

In Flex 3 no you can't do it unless you upload the file to the server and then download the file via a url to the desktop.

In Air or Flex 4 you can save it directly from the application to the desktop as detailed above.