[cebuy]

I have never tried to do any VB programming before in Microsoft Access (so keep in mind I am a greenhorn newbie) but I had a problem that needed solving. I have a database full of articles but there is one problem. The articles are full of special characters, that show as boxes, which cannot be removed normally in Access like you can regular characters like a, b, c, 1, 2, 3....etc.

Those special characters are only 2 really. The special characters are the hard return & tab characters. I found this article from Microsoft (http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=210433 )that will allow you to replace one special character for another character. In that example it replaces the tab character with a % character.

I got that to work for me just fine with a simple replace of the tab for a % BUT...

What I really wanted to do was to replace the tab character with a longer string of text like the html code (&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; ) for three non breaking spaces (in order to keep the tab's look in the html output) (AND was going to also replace the hard returns with <br>). Well problem is this... when the module replaced it
it would place only the & from the first character in the replacement text. Then I went to Mid(strText, intStart, 1) = "&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;" and changed the 1 to 18 and it seemed like it worked but it did not just replace the tabs in the article but also some of the following characters too.

Example: (<tab> represents the tab character)

PHP Code:

List of things to do...

<tab>take out the trash

<tab>go to store and get soap 

would turn into something like this...

PHP Code:

List of things to do...

   h

   et soap 

What I really wanted was this...

PHP Code:

List of things to do...

   take out the trash

   go to store and get soap 

I hope this was clear what I was trying to do. I only wanted to replace the tab but I wanted to use more than one character when I do that. I used this code below given by Microsoft....


Code is..

PHP Code:

'============================================================

' The following function will:

'   - Find the tabs in a Text or Memo field.

'   - Call another function to replace the tabs.

' ============================================================



Function FindTabs(WhichField As String) As String

   Dim intCounter As Integer

   Dim strText As String

   Dim intStart As Integer



   intStart = 1

   intCounter = 1

   strText = WhichField



   Do Until intCounter = 0

      ' Chr(9) is the Tab character.

      ' Replace Chr(9) with the ANSI code for the character

      ' you are searching for.

      intCounter = InStr(intStart, strText, Chr(9))

      intStart = intCounter + 1

      If intCounter > 0 And Not IsNull(intCounter) Then

         strText = ReplaceTabs(intCounter, strText)

      End If

   Loop



   FindTabs = strText

End Function



'==================================================================

' The following function is called from the FindTabs() function. It

' accepts two arguments, intStart and strText. The function replaces tabs

' with %. It returns the updated text.

'==================================================================



Function ReplaceTabs(intStart As Integer, strText As String) As String

   ' Replace % with the character you want to substitute.

   Mid(strText, intStart, 1) = "%"

   ReplaceTabs = strText

End Function 

[mas_detokyo]

You might want to try built-in function "Replace".

Code:

strString = Replace(strString, Chr(9), " &nbsp ")

Cheers,
mas

[cebuy]

Where does this go in the code exactly since I do not see the variable 'strString' in the original code? Please understand I am a novice at this.

strString = Replace(strString, Chr(9), "&nbsp;&nbsp&nbsp;")

[mas_detokyo]

...

Code:

Function FindTabs(WhichField As String) As String 

FindTabs= Replace(WhichField 
, Chr(9), " &nbsp ")

End Function

mas