a question about string

I am writing some strings into a file and the strngs are supposed to take the same width in the output file. ( If the length of the string is not equal, spaces will be added. )
but I found that it doesn't work well. It seems that even if the strngs are of the same length, the space they take might be different. :(
IS there any way that I can force the strings of the equal length take equal space in the output file?

Fixed lenght strings...

Dim MyString as String * 20

where 20 would be the string size

I guess I am not completly sure what you mean by take the same space. Do you mean that the if one string was written directly below the other string, they would be the same length?

If so, just display the strings using a fixed-length font such as "Courier New"

If I misunderstood, please try to elaborate and I will try to help

Yes, That's what I mean. I expect one character is right below the character above, and the "Space" character takes the same width of other normal characters like a, b, A, B.

But I found that I can only make that work when I set my notepad's font to "FixedSys", otherwise the character "A" will tkae a little wder space than "a". So do you know how to set the font to be "fixedsys" when I write to the file from VB?

The font has nothing to do with the text that's stored in the file. It is a property of the application you use to view the file. So you will have to set the font in Notepad or Word, or whatever text editor you use to view the file.

Of course, Word has it's own method for saving fonts as part of the file, but I don't know if you can do that very easily. Notepad opens everything up with the same font (whichever was last selected by the user in Notepad).

If you want to change the font that Notepad uses, it's stored in the registry, so you could do this:

VB Code:

Private Sub SetNotepadFont(sFontName As String)
    Dim oShell As Object
    
    Set oShell = CreateObject("WScript.Shell")
    
    oShell.RegWrite "HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Notepad\lfFaceName", sFontName
    
    Set oShell = Nothing
End Sub

Then you could call the function like this:

VB Code:

' These are all "Fixed-Width" fonts, like you want
SetNotepadFont "Courier"   ' - OR -
SetNotepadFont "Courier New"   ' - OR -
SetNotepadFont "Lucida Console"   ' (<- This is Notepad's default) - OR -
SetNotepadFont "FixedSys"

Hi, Seaweed, Cool! It works! Thank you so much !