Be clever with strings

Hi all i have a problem that i have no idea how to solve. I’ll start with what i’d like to be able to do.

i have a dynamic text feild which is being populater with text.

disText.text = “I may start “utopian island” soon. Then we can recline while the robots and the
animals do our bidding. Within reason. No monkeys in bras. &&about 1 hour ago from web”;

i can format this text like so:

myformat = new TextFormat();
myformat.color = 0x004487;
myformat.size = 16;
myformat.align = “center”;
myformat.font = “Arial”;

_root.disText.setTextFormat(myformat);

okay so that is all good.

Now i need to search the string and find the &&, any text after this point will need to be formatted in a different way.

i have done a search and replace

function searchReplace(block:String, find:String, replace:String):String {
return block.split(find).join(replace);
}

disText.text = searchReplace(_root.disText.text, “&”, “”)

so that the special characters are replaced with nothing but i cant find a way of findig out where in the string the special characters were and how to modify the text that is after the special characters i.e the about 1 hour ago

is there a better way of approaching this or is it even possible?