I hacking together a report today and discovered the Unicode text I received was actually in Unicode not ASCII. I remembered that ChrW(int) will convert character codes to their associated character. I really wasn’t in the mood to write parsing logic and test it, but luckily I came across a class which does this. I ripped out the method I needed and it worked great in all it’s simplicity. I have included this function below:
Public Function UnicodeToASCII(sText As String) As String
Dim saText() As String, sChar As String
Dim sFinal As String, saFinal() As String
Dim x As Long, lPos As Long
If Len(sText) = 0 Then
Exit Function
End If
saText = Split(sText, ";") 'Unicode Chars are semicolon separated
If UBound(saText) = 0 And InStr(1, sText, "&#") = 0 Then
UnicodeToASCII = sText
Exit Function
End If
ReDim saFinal(UBound(saText))
For x = 0 To UBound(saText)
lPos = InStr(1, saText(x), "&#", vbTextCompare)
If lPos > 0 Then
sChar = Mid$(saText(x), lPos + 2, Len(saText(x)) - (lPos + 1))
If IsNumeric(sChar) Then
If CLng(sChar) > 255 Then
sChar = ChrW$(sChar)
Else
sChar = Chr$(sChar)
End If
End If
saFinal(x) = Left$(saText(x), lPos - 1) & sChar
ElseIf x < UBound(saText) Then
saFinal(x) = saText(x) & ";" 'This Semicolon wasn't a Unicode Character
Else
saFinal(x) = saText(x)
End If
Next
sFinal = Join(saFinal, "")
UnicodeToASCII = sFinal
Erase saText
Erase saFinal
End Function

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