Joshua Ho’s Blog

Today I was in a conundrum. I was working on an upload script in AS3 that checks the file type and uploads it to a server. I had a problem with the FileReference class and Mac’s. (on Windows it was ok, but Mac’s did not work). According to the Actionscript 3 docs, all I need to do to check the type of a file is call the property type. ( see documentation: http://livedocs.adobe.com/flash/9.0/ActionScriptLangRefV3/flash/net/FileReference.html)

Normally the code would look like this:


var file:FileReference = new FileReference();
trace( file.type ); //where file.type would return the file type.


On a Mac machine, file.type returns null. However file.name returns the file name as it is supposed to. I could not find any real solutions, but instead just wrote a workaround class for this.


public static function extractFileType(fileName:String):String {
var extensionIndex:Number = fileName.lastIndexOf(".");
if (extensionIndex == -1) {
return "";
} else {
return "." + fileName.substr(extensionIndex + 1,fileName.length);
}
}


What this function does takes the file name and searches for the “.” and grabs the remaining characters returning the characters as a string. This imitates FileReference type property where it returns the file type as a string.

I have uploaded my simple class that can be downloaded here:
http://www.josh-ho.com/blog/Files/FileReferenceType.zip