Special Symbol
Special characters built with Unicode/ASCII. In Microsoft Word there are various methods to bring special symbols using Insert options or just copy from some other source and paste in Word. The real challenge is in programming world where you are creating code that would read these symbols from a Word Document and parse them back.
These days, mostly applications are moving on APIs or Cloud technologies and VBA also taken into that by putting Web Services. Transporting the data from one end to another end and vise versa. The use case I have encountered and sharing solution based on that. May be developers can use it by modifying to fit in their needs.
I have used some tricks and some straight forward code to get symbol parsing bidirectionally. See how to identify special symbols in Microsoft Word:
Common ASCII Symbols
These symbols gets represented by code greater than 122 and can be trapped as follows:
Public Function ReadSymbolExample(strInput As String) As String
Dim i As Integer
For i = 1 To Len(strCharacteers)
If Asc(Mid(strCharacteers, i, 1)) > 122 Then
'Build your string as you have caught a special symbol
End If
Next i
End Function
Multi Bytes Symbol
These symbols are having one value SPACE 40 SPACE and cannot be directly determined:
Code example
Public Function ReadSymbol(strInput As String) As String
Dim i As Integer
For i = 1 To Len(strCharacteers)
If Asc(Mid(strCharacteers, i, 1)) = " 40 " Then
Debug.Print DecodeMultiByteSymbol Asc(Mid(strCharacteers, i, 1))
End If
Next i
End Function
Decode multi bytes symbols example
Public Function DecodeMultiByteSymbol(sSymbol As String) As String
Dim fontName As String
Dim charNum As String
Selection.Find.ClearFormatting
With Selection.Find
.text = "[" & ChrW(61472) & "-" & ChrW(61695) & "]"
.Replacement.text = ""
.Forward = False
.Wrap = wdFindStop
.Format = False
.MatchCase = False
.MatchWholeWord = False
.MatchAllWordForms = False
.MatchSoundsLike = False
.MatchWildcards = True
End With
While Selection.Find.Execute
With Dialogs(wdDialogInsertSymbol)
fontName = .Font
charNum = .charNum
End With
GoTo exitpoint
Wend
exitpoint:
End Function
Encode multi bytes code example
Public Sub EncodeMultiByteSymbols(fontName As String, charNumber As String)
Selection.InsertSymbol Font:=fontName, CharacterNumber:=charNumber, Unicode:=True
End Sub
