benwatts.ca

I was trying to figure out how to access the width of the stage as it is when you make a document in Flash (defaults to that lovable 550px wide). Not only that, but I was trying to do it from an external AS document (ie. an AS file that wasn’t the document class); long story short about that — any external AS file that extends MovieClip or Sprite is ultimately just a far-away subclass of the DisplayObject class; therefore,

or

works in external AS docs AFTER the class has been added to the stage (that’s the gotcha!).

OKAY, so: 

(or height) gives you the width of everything currently on the stage. If you’ve got nothing on the stage,

returns 0. It was incredibly frustrating.

Moral of the story:

trace(this.stage.width); // width of everything currently on the stage (could be 0)
this.stage.stageWidth; // width of the stage (defaults to 550)