Jeff Tapper's Blog

It's really convenient for anyone coming from an HTML background that we can now provide colors to Flex using html standard syntax for hexidecimal number (#000000 = black, #ffffff= white, etc).  I've recently been building some tools to convert drawings in the flash player to and from SVG format. SVG, like HTML, likes to specify hexidecimal numbers with a "#" prefix, but the flash player drawing API needs hexidecimal numbers to be prefixed with "0x"  To help migrate back and forth between hexStrings and AS numbers, I wrote a few static methods, which are working well for me:

package utils {
 public class Colors {
  public static function hexStringToNumber(hexStr:String):Number{
   if(hexStr.length != 7){
    return -1;
   }
   if(hexStr.charAt(0) != "#"){
    return -1;
   }
   var newStr:String = hexStr.substr(1,6);
   var numStr:String = "0x"+newStr;
   var num:Number = Number(numStr);
   return num;
  }
  public static function numToHexString(num:Number):String{
   var hexStr:String = num.toString(16);
   while(hexStr.length < 6){
    hexStr = "0"+hexStr;
   }
   hexStr = "#"+hexStr;
   return hexStr;
  }
 }
}

As you can see, there are 2 methods hexStringToNumber and numToHexString.  These can be used simply like this:

var whiteNum:Number = Colors.hexStringToNumber ("#ffffff");
var whiteStr:String = Colors.numToHexString(16777215);