simple actionscript hex2dec/dec2hex methods

Actionscript suffers like many other languages from poor string parsing commands. What would take one line of well crafted perl is… a bit more complex here.

public function hex2dec( hex:String ) : String {
	var bytes:Array = [];
	while( hex.length > 2 ) {
		var byte:String = hex.substr( -2 );
		hex = hex.substr(0, hex.length-2 );
		bytes.splice( 0, 0, int("0x"+byte) );
	}
	return bytes.join(" ");
}

private function d2h( d:int ) : String {
	var c:Array = [ '0', '1', '2', '3', '4', '5', '6', '7', '8',
			'9', 'A', 'B', 'C', 'D', 'E', 'F' ];
	if( d > 255 ) d = 255;
	var l:int = d / 16;
	var r:int = d % 16;
	return c[l]+c[r];
}

public function dec2hex( dec:String ) : String {
	var hex:String = "0x";
	var bytes:Array = dec.split(" ");
	for( var i:int = 0; i < bytes.length; i++ )
		hex += d2h( int(bytes[i]) );
	return hex;
}

What do these methods do? Well, hex2dec takes a hexadecimal string (and assumes you have a throwaway prefix of “0x” or “#”) and returns a space-separated list of decimal values. dec2hex does the same thing, but in reverse.

hex2dec("0xF00F04") returns “240 15 4″
dec2hex("240 15 4") returns “0xF00F04″

Also, the method doesn’t much care if you’ve got 6 hex digits or 60.

There are a few optimizations I could make on this code here, but it’s not getting called that frequently anyway. The performance gains in my application would be trivial.

And just by way of warning, this is AS3 code. It’d need a few tweaks to work reliably in AS2 or (shudder) AS1 environments. Actually, I should make a standard boilerplate for here since I’m only ever really going to present AS3.

is this thing on?

Testing. Testing.

This post is a placeholder because WordPress is bugged and incapable of dealing with the notion of a brand new blog that has yet to receive any real posts. I’ll get around to writing something soon. Probably.

See… I’ve been writing software for a while now. I’ve even put my hand to the odd PHP/MySQL system before. And this sort of bug really annoys me. WordPress is a great application. I use it to host my personal web site. Yet… they’ve never gotten around to patching this issue. I understand that it is an edge case (any blog w/o posts is either going to have a post soon or has been abandoned), but that’s no excuse.

Pseudo-solution:

$query = "select * from wp_posts";
$result = mysql_query($query);
if( mysql_num_rows($result) > 0 ) {
    render_the_site_as_normal();
} else {
    // complain_and_throw_an_error();
    render_placeholder_because_there_are_no_posts_yet();
}

Notice my clever swapping of the “file not found” type error screen for a useful message? Yeah. It honestly is that simple.