Display Unicode Characters in VB (Article)

Category:

String Manipulation

Type:

Snippets

Difficulty:

Intermediate

Author:

David Nishimoto

Version Compatibility: Visual Basic 6

More information:

Listen Software Solutions Learn how to get rid of the ??? in VB when using Unicode characters. http://www.listensoftware.com/vb_unicode.html Learn how to use HTML/ASP/Oracle UTF8/ with Unicode http://www.listensoftware.com/unicode.html Please add these articles to your site. David Nishimoto

Instructions: Copy the declarations and code below and paste directly into your VB project.

Declarations:
' (None)

Code:

<table border="1">
	<tr>
		<td>
		<ul>
		<li>Add the "Microsoft Forms 2.0 Object Library" as a component (Ctrl-T). This components provides Unicode supportted controls, such as: textbox, label, command button,list box, combo box, checkbox, radio button, toggle button, image, tabstrip, and multiple page control.
		<li>Add a Scrollbar control with a range of 33 to 65533 (Unicode 2.1 code point range)
		<li>Display in a Unicode supported textbox the Unicode code point and Unicode value.
		<li>chrW takes a long value in the range of 0 to 65535 and returns a Unicode code point whose length is 1.
		<li>hex takes a long value and converts the value from decimal to hexidecimal
		<li>Visual Basic represents all characters as 2-byte Unicode integers. So the string "help" is represented as 
		h[00 68] e[00 65] l[00 6C] p[00 70] ->each character is broke down into 2-byte sequence per Unicode code point . So the variable sCodePoint can all Unicode code points or combinations of code points without conversion. Calling external DLL will require a conversion to ANSI.
		
		</ul>
		</td>
	</tr>
</table>

<PRE>

Option Explicit
Private Sub Form_Load()
    ScrollBar1.Min = 33
    ScrollBar1.Max = 65533

Font.Name = "Arial Unicode MS"
    Font.Size = 12

ScrollBar1_Change
End Sub

Private Sub ScrollBar1_Change()
   Dim sCodePoint

txtDecimalNumber.Text = ScrollBar1.Value
 txtUnicodeNumber.Text = "U+" & Hex(txtDecimalNumber.Text)
 sCodePoint = ChrW(txtDecimalNumber.Text)

txtCodePoint.Text=sCodePoint
End Sub

</pre>