Help returning a value from a class

programming flash
1

I am really unexperienced when it comes to classes so bare with me. I decided to turn this util into a class because I use it in almost all of my projects. Basically what it is is I import an XML file and it has all these HTML characters like & or &nbsp and my function basically converts those strings of characters to its regular form ie: [’&’ (&)] or [’ ’ (&nbsp)]

so calling it in a FLA file would be something like this:


var entity:DeEntitizeHTML = new DeEntitizeHTML("bob & jim");

and here is my class file:


class com.dop.DeEntitizeHTML
{
	function DeEntitizeHTML(my_str)
	{
		runStr(my_str);
	}
	private function runStr(my_str:String):String
	{
		var chars:Array = my_str.split("");
		for (var i = 0; i < chars.length; i++)
		{
			if (chars* == "&")
			{
				var entity:String = "";
				for (var j = 0, myChar = ""; myChar != ';'; j++)
				{
					var myChar:String = String(chars.splice(i, 1));
					if (myChar == " ")
					{
						entity = "& ";
						myChar = ';';
					}
					else
					{
						entity += myChar;
					}
					if (j > chars.length)
					{
						trace("OVERFLOW!!");
						break;
					}
				}
				chars.splice(i,0,swapEntityForChar(entity));
			}
		}
		my_str = chars.join("");
		return (my_str);
	}
	private function swapEntityForChar(myStr:String):String
	{
		switch (myStr)
		{
			case "&#13;" :
				// CR
				return ("
");
				break;
			case "&#160;" :
				// non-breaking space
				return (" ");
				break;
			case "&amp;" :
				return ("&");
				break;
			case "& " :
				// special Kludge
				return ("& ");
				break;
			case "&bull;" :
				// bullet
				return ("•");
				break;
			case "&ge;" :
				return ("&#8805;");
				break;
			case "&gt;" :
				return (">");
				break;
			case "&hellip;" :
				return ("…");
				break;
			case "&ldquo;" :
				return ('“');
				break;
			case "&le;" :
				return ("&#8804;");
				break;
			case "&lsquo;" :
				return ("‘");
				break;
			case "&lt;" :
				return ("<");
				break;
			case "&minus;" :
				return ("-");
				break;
			case "&mdash;" :
				return ("—");
				break;
			case "&ndash;" :
				return ("–");
				break;
			case "&rdquo;" :
				return ('”');
				break;
			case "&rsquo;" :
				return ("’");
				break;
			default :
				return (" ");
		}
	}
}

I cant figure out how to return that value back to the var entity in my FLA. Any help please?