So here’s what I did to resolve the issue:

- Ensure that the mySQL tables where the text is stored are using the utf8_general_ci Collation.

- Set $gateway->setCharsetHandler( “none”, “ISO-8859-1″, “ISO-8859-1″ ) in the gateway.php file (in case you’re wondering, yes you should simply NOT use iconv or utf_decoder or mbstring or the like, just disable the setCharsetHandler conversion by using “none” as the conversion method).

- in your php service file, say it’s called permissions.php, use the following :

$rsConnectionID=mysql_connect("localhost", "root", "");
mysql_set_charset("utf8", $rsConnectionID);

Be sure to have these set before running your query or passing the results to flash.

This should resolve all the issues you’re having, of course you should not use the following actionScript : system.useCodepage = true; as this will tell the flash player not to use utf 8 as default encoding and will surely get you into troubles.

A side effect of adobe’s announcement that flash CS5 will export to iPhone and iPod touch was encouraging thousands of flash developers to buy an iPhone or iPod touch to have the appropriate hardware to test and develop Flash-based ipa, at least that’s what I did…Now Apple should be grateful to this “free Marketing favor” Adobe inadvertently offered to say the least…

I already have a windows mobile powered HTC touch diamond phone and I invested in buying a 3rd generation 32 GB iPod touch for that purpose, if Apple continues its tight policy about 3rd party-built ipa, then I will either have to invest in an Android or just keep my ipas for myself! I might even have to jailbreak the iPod to be able to use my own built applications on my device! please correct me if I am wrong (should the device be jailbroken to install my own self-built ipas without having to kiss Mr Jobs ‘hand’ to get approval?)

After months of work, we are glad to announce the immediate availability of the actionscript3 flash shopping cart.
Packed with lots of features (video support, multiple payment processors and gateways, supporting paypal, 2checkout and authorize.net) this new cart is probably the most flexible yet lightweight cart available today.

This actionScript3 shopping cart takes advantage of the rendering engine of flash player 9 and up, its performance exceeds actionscript2 carts by far and you can be sure your customers will receive first class user experience using our cart.

With a filesize less than 150 Kb, you will be amazed of the number of features this cart brings to your online store.

You can have several categories of goods sold through the cart, tangible and intangible (clothing, software, video lectures etc…). The cart supports all video and image formats supported by the flash player.

The cart comes in two flavors, an XML driven version and a mySQL+php adminPanel powered version; both flavors are ready to go products with no learning curves.\r\n

The XML driven version can run on any server, there are no special requirements, no database installation or server side scripting needed whatsoever.

The mySQL adminPanel powered version uses a mySQL database to store the details about the products and a php backend to manage the database through a very user friendly interface that makes sense!

Just fill in the details of each product, upload the images and you are ready to sell online.

Additional gateways and payment processors can also be incorporated into the cart upon request.

The actionscript3 flash shopping cart can be connected to an optional automatic delivery system (sold separately) which is extremely useful for digital goods; buyers can immediately download the digital product they bought without intervention by the merchant.

We offer two licensing schemes for maximum flexibility, a designer version and a developer version.

The designer package of the actionScript3 shopping cart does not include source code.

So what if you want to customize the look of the cart? Well it is easier than doing it yourself, you can simply send us a psd or a draft of your design and we can do that for you and send you the finished, ready to deploy, swf file.

A single license (works on one domain) costs 150 USD for the XML driven version and 250 USD for the adminPanel version.

The developer package allows you to do practically anything with the cart since full commented source code is included. The licensing scheme of the developer package is more flexible than the designer package since you can use the cart on an unlimited number of domains without restrictions.

The look and feel of the cart is easily customizable if you have the developer version, all you need is flash CS3 or higher and some basic flash knowledge.

The XML version of the developer package costs 1000 USD while the adminPanel powered version costs 1500 USD.

We offer free installation and technical support with every sale (applies for both the designer and developer versions).

We’re also capable of adding custom features, integrating the cart with existing flash sites, and translating the interface to different languages (additional fee, depends on complexity of the task).

Here’s the demo of the AS3 flash shopping cart, This version supports using videos as description of an item as well as a large picture or even an swf file.
the demo connects to paypal as payment gateway yet the retail version supports 2checkout and authorize.net as well. 

I can now say with confidence, Adobe is following a pattern with every new release of Flash since CS3, the documentations are getting crappier with every release, not a good strategy if they want people to actually learn flash and if they want to expand the use of flash as a platform.

CS4 brought yet another disappointment to me and millions of RTF users, the “ligature” support is buried deep inside some user unfriendly classes and there is no simple way to access this essential feature for the average user by simply setting a property for a static or dynamic text field, way to go Adobe, really smart!\r\n

So was Flash CS4 really released or is this just another pre-release alpha quality software? The latter seems more probable.

3D is also a much awaited feature yet papervision3D and alternative3D as well as other packages have much more than what adobe has to offer and are open source which make me wonder why adobe has not simply acquired and integrated one of these packages…

Again I feel that adobe is slowly but steadily removing the carpet from under the feet of AS2 developers, as I speculated, there’s no access to these goodies from within AVM1 i.e. AS2 is retiring in the eyes of the flash team and unless someone comes with some ingenious way to keep AS2 “hip and cool”, all of us AS2 guys will have to make the switch into the bitter AS3 beast with its unfriendly compiler that keeps yelling at you even you write one line of straight forward code…

One depressing find out is that RTL is not supported in static text fields, only in dynamic and input text fields with exotic ligature turned on.

Again, flash does not have an onMouseStill event so I had to do it this way:


this.onMouseMove=function(){
clearTimeout(toInt);
fadeControlsIn();
toInt=setTimeout(fadeOut,3000);

}


A similar approach can be applied to keypresses.

Hope this helps.

There are many other features added like CPU surfacing and GPU compositing as well as enhanced drawing API and native 3D support yet the RTL support is something we’ve been waiting for long time, finally it has arrived! Thx Adobe, let’s hope it works as advertisied.

[as]
function lTrim(txt:String):String {
while
(txt.charAt(0)==” ”
||txt.charAt(0)==”\t”
|| txt.charAt(0)==”\n”
|| txt.charAt(0)==”\r”
) {
txt=txt.substring(1,txt.length-1);
}
return txt;
}
//usage example:
trace(lTrim(” here’s a text to trim”));// outputs : here’s a text to trim
[/as]

Pretty much straight forward, the function accepts a string as argument and returns a string, it checks whether the first character is a space, tab, or newline character and simply cuts it out and runs the same check on the resulting substring until there are no white spaces left at the leftmost end of the string.

Now for the slightly harder rTrim function,

[as]

function rTrim (txt:String):String {

while (txt.charAt(txt.length-1)==” ” ||txt.charAt(txt.length-1)==”\t” || txt.charAt(txt.length-1)==”\n” || txt.charAt(txt.length-1)==”\r”){
txt=txt.substring(0,txt.length-1);
}
return txt;

}
trace(rTrim (“rtrim this please \n\r “)+”delimiter”);//outputs : rtrim this pleasedelimiter

[/as]
The logic is very similar, feel free to use these wherever you like.
I would recommend using these as part of a class for string manipulation.
Btw, these functions are AS2 and AS3 compatible.