Update - Flex Text Highlighter Class

Last night I updated my demo of tl.text.Highlighter, my TextField highlighting class for Flex. You point it at a TextField object, and then use one of its methods to highlight the word or words of your choosing. Here's the demo (right-click it to view source).

In this revision, I added some performance optimizations to reduce the number of calls to TextField.getCharBoundaries, which it turns out was the most expensive call I was making. In the last version, I highlighted each character individually, regardless of whether it was part of a word or not, because it was easier to handle word wrapping that way. This meant making a separate call to TextField.getCharBoundaries for each letter in a word. The performance was pretty good, but could get a little slow when highlighting a whole paragraph. Now, I make two calls per word: one for the first character, and one for the last character and combine them into a single Rectangle object that spans the whole word (a la Keith Peters). It's a bit trickier to manage when words or phrases wrap into multiple lines, but I was able to write some logic to handle those scenarios.

Anyway, this results in much better performance when highlighting many sequential characters in a TextField. To pull this off, I created a StringBoundaries class which returns an array of Rectangles that define the boundaries of the character range. The array has a length of 1 if the character range fits on one line.

Also, I moved the search logic into a separate class called Finder, where it will be easier to work with. I intend to add some features such as Match Whole Words Only and Case Sensitive/Insensitive options.

Keep those suggestions coming!