Last time I ran into the problem of Flash’s NavigateToURL being blocked in IE, and the fix was to set wmode. Last night I hit another wmode problem: a text input field in Flash (a genuine TextField in CS4, type=’input’), once embedded in a web page, couldn’t take Chinese input properly in Firefox — the IME worked, but everything typed came out garbled.

I’m never one to back down from wrestling with the most bizarre problems—let’s see who comes out on top. It’s been ages since I hit an obstacle while coding, yet today I ran into a little snag—XML generated by PHP came out as garbled text when fetched with FLASH. After some digging I finally solved it. Recording it here, and also jotting down the general solution. If you also run into XML <-> FLASH garbled text, here’s a quick reference: 1. When you’re certain the XML is absolutely fine:First, FLASH reading XML and getting garbled text involves the static property System.useCodepage. Official description: “A Boolean value that tells Flash Player which code page to use to interpret external text files.” Defaults to false.