There are several tutorials in this site that cover how to load data from an external location. But, there are no tutorials on this site that discuss how to format and process your data for any use greater than displaying them as a string in a textField.
Unlike XML data which can be formatted extensively in Flash using Flash's own built-in accessors, the data I will focus on will be for less structured output that you would encounter most when loading variables from a text file or simple PHP scripts