ActionScript 2.0 :: Detect Newlines In Dynamically Loaded Wrapped Multiline Textfield

I have the following composition from my designer:

So, I have to load these two HTML paragraphs from an XML file and put them in two actionscript created text fields. The text fields are multiline, wrapped and html and they are displayed just fine. Then I have to hilight one of the textfields just like in the image above so I must define a function that takes this textfield as an argument and creates a movieclip behind it. All I have to do further is draw some lines in this movieclip.

The problem is I just can't detect the newline characters in the text field so I can draw the hilights from the start of each line to the end of it.

Here is my function:

function hilight(sapou_txt){
var hilight_mc = sapou_txt._parent.createEmptyMovieClip("hilight_mc",-1);
hilight_mc._x = -5;
hilight_mc._y = sapou_txt._y;}

There would be .indexOf("") method of strings but if I use it after sapou_txt.text this has no result because, apparently, all I have there is a string without any special newline characters, just as I loaded it from the XML file, minus HTML tags.

If I use sapou_txt.htmlText apparently I get the original text including the HTML tags but, again, no special newline characters and, as you probably realised from my description above, I need both newlines from HTML (wich are not so hard to detect) and newlines caused by wrapping text in the textfield. Anyway, if I succeed in detcting newlines in the text field then I won't need the newlines in my original HTML.