Displaying ‘&’ and ‘+’ in a Flash textfield

For a recent project(CLR), I was stuck because of some unassuming characters! They were very adamant and just wouldnt show up. Meet the ‘&’ character and the ‘+’ character. These guys wouldnt budge an inch from their invisible stand despite me saving the text file as ANSI or UTF-8 or Unicode. I was pulling text from a text file into a Flash textfield and these characters just couldnt tolerate it!

As usual I began the ‘googling it out’ routine and after many unsuccessfull attempts I stumbled upon this page: http://i-technica.com/whitestuff/urlencodechart.html where I found the dreaded solution! Use the htmlencode characters as follows:
& – %26
+ – %2b

Here’s a page where you can enter you content and get the required converted data in the appropriate format: http://www.dommermuth-1.com/protosite/experiments/encode/index.html