When Flash Player 7 was introduced, Macromedia added some very powerful features into their TextField object. Most notably, the ability to display a lot of HTML formatted text, including images. And you can even use Cascading Style Sheets!

Do you have a Shopping Cart program that uses Flash, and you need to display or print receipts with product Barcodes? One solution would be to have jpg files of all the barcodes and load them into Flash.

However, I will show you how to dynamically generate and display barcodes using Actionscript and a barcode font. This can save you a lot of storage space and bandwidth, and will generate vector barcodes, which will look smoother and print better than a jpg file.

Putting some of our basics together, let's try to write a simple Actionscript email validator. What are the criteria for an email address to be valid?

Well at first glance, here are some fairly basic rules: