Remove Garbage Characters

[GDOG34]

I have a file that I have attached and it contains just numbers, but when I load the file into the applications and show the file in a messagebox I can see garbage characters that where never in the file. I attached a picture of the messagebox.How can I remove these?

[Merri]

The characters aren't garbage, instead the file has been saved using UTF-8 encoding. This means the first 128 characters (thus including numbers and basic English alphabet) are the same as in US-ASCII, but the remaining bytes are assigned a special encoding that allows Unicode code points to be represented.

Anyway, the first three characters are actually used to identify a UTF-8 encoded text file in Windows.

I guess in your case you can just ignore them (the data being just numbers & spaces), so simply do Mid$(strFile, 4) to get rid of them if you're reading the whole file at once into a string. If you save the file again and the source of the file is another application then you probably must have the three bytes at the beginning of the file.

[GDOG34]

I see, the reason why the file is saved in UTF-8 is because I was testing the file in different formats. I have tried saving it in Unicode but I end up with "Runtime Error 62: Input Past End Of File". The following code I have to read the file is:

Dim fileNum As Integer
fileNum = FreeFile
Open App.Path & "\file.txt" For Input As #fileNum
FileCaption.Caption = Replace$(Input(LOF(fileNum), fileNum), vbCrLf, "")
Close #fileNum

[Merri]

The problem is that VB6 is not Unicode aware with it's native file methods. One of the easiest ways to work around the issue is to read the file to a byte array:

Dim fileNum As Integer, bytData() As Byte
fileNum = FreeFile
Open App.Path & "\file.txt" For Binary Access Read As #fileNum
    ReDim bytData(0 To LOF(fileNum) - 1)
    Get #fileNum, , bytData
Close #fileNum
FileCaption.Caption = Replace(CStr(bytData), vbCrLf, vbNullString)

However any non-ANSI character is not displayed in this case, because VB6 native controls are not Unicode aware either. bytData and string copied from bytData will hold true Unicode UTF-16 information though when loaded this way.

Note that I removed the dollar sign from Replace because it is a special case that always returns a String datatype, unlike Mid and many others.

[GDOG34]

I get the error type Mismatch and it highlights

bytData

on the last line.

[Merri]

Change bytData() As String to bytData() As Byte

[GDOG34]

Change bytData() As String to bytData() As Byte

Merri, Where is bytData() As String?

[Merri]

It was in post #4, I updated the code in it so it no longer is there and should work when pasted.