ActionScript: Useful Bits #1

I'm rather new to ActionScript3 (and AIR) though I've done a lot of Javascript in the past. In fact, I'm so new I wasn't aware until a week ago that ActionScript had evolved so much since I first checked it out when AIR was in its first beta. I was impressed to see that it is now a "real" language. Anyway, following are some random notes covering useful features I've stumbled over, as a reference for myself.

String Operations

The String class is okay, but still feels a bit clunky (compared to strings in Python) for your basic wet work. There are a few utility routines buried in different places that look useful.

Package mx.utils.StringUtil has a few goodies, including:

restrict() to strip out unwanted characters (could also use a regex)
substitute() does what it says, like %s in C and various techniques in Python
trim() removes leading and trailing whitespace. What, they couldn't put this in the base class?!

Debugging

mx.utils.ObjectUtil.toString() gives a great debug dump of any object, and the class has a bunch of other useful functions like dateCompare() and copy() and clone() (though it's unclear to me what's different about the latter two).
flash.utils.describeType() barfs back an XML representation of an object, with signatures for all methods, properties, etc.
flash.utils also has getDefinitionByName() for retrieving classes by name and getQualifiedClassName() for retrieving names (String) of classes.

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