asked on

Getting rid of Word control characters before writing text to another application

I'm developing a script for work using VBA that reads information from a MS Word Document, uses Split to create an array, then writes the contents of the array into an Excel file. The Word document is a highly formatted Form and I need the data to be placed in Excel so that it is delimited by the text in each section (one cell per line of text, basically).

Everything is almost great using Chr(13) as my Split delimiter character, this splits the text correctly but I still get some looking characters outputted to the Excel sheet. I want to suppress these control characters but have so far had no success in doing it. I need the characters to be gone so that I can next use ADODB to create a recordset from the Excel sheet and I only want text in the recordset. I've marched through every ASCII charachter from 0 to 255 with no success. How do I get rid of the remaining control characters before they go into the array or before they go into the Excel sheet?

Here is an example of the output..... PUT IN VERIFIED PUT IN VERIFIED PUT IN VERIFIED PUT IN VERIFIED
BY BY BY BY BY BY BY BY

ALDA

KYZF

ALDB

KYZG

DarkoLord

Read the data back from Excel and use Asc() function to find out which character is that

Darko

Burbble

(what he said)...and then use strData = Replace(strData, Chr(x), "")

-Burbble

philTN

ASKER

Tried that but it won't return an ASC code for the character. Instead it spits out the first two codes (horizontal tab and space), then returns an error saying "invalid procedure or argument" when it encounters one of the square looking characters.

By saving to a text file using FSO and splitting the array on Chr(13), I've been able to figure out that the characters in question seem to be placeholders for blank cells within the original Word table. The table is composed of 3 columns, only one of which currently contains data. Although there is no data or extraneous spaces in the other two cells, these square looking characters get written to the text file and match up exactly with where there are blank cells in the table. The current output to the text file looks like this:

\ALDA\\\KYZF\\\\\\\\\\ALDB\\\

It also seems to be saving a delimiter of sort between tables(i have 4 tables across with 3 columns each).

philTN

ASKER

I can further clarify after turning on the formatting marks in the original Word 2000 document that the characters are the paragraph marks. These marks are not eliminated by the Split command. So how do I remove them either before or after saving to Excel or plain text? I've already tried Trim and Replace but that was because i thought they wre rtf codes. All i got in return was that it was a type mismatch for "\" or"{".

Burbble

Paragraph marks... maybe Chr(10) and Chr(13)?

Try...

strData = Replace(strData, Chr$(10), "")
strData = Replace(strData, Chr$(13), "")

-Burbble

philTN

ASKER

Thanks, I tried that but it still didn't work. When I tried reading in the ASCII code for the character it kept telling me (13) but it wouldn't Replace it.

I found what I was looking for through further research. By calling Excel's CLEAN function from VB I was able to make another copy of the seadsheet with all non-printing characters deleted, with one line of code. Thanks again to both of you for your help.

phil

Burbble

Ah, ok. Glad you got it fixed :)

-Burbble

ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION

modulo

membership

This solution is only available to members.

To access this solution, you must be a member of Experts Exchange.

Start Free Trial