In making the function, I would first convert the integer to a string with the "D" format string. This will ensure you get just integral digits. Then spin through each of the characters in the string which you know are simply the digits 0->9 (assuming you ignore negative numbers!). You can change the lookup dictionary to be (Of Char,String) and map "0"c to ChrW(&H2080) (thanks for the correction, Inferred!) and so on. For each character, lookup the string and append that string to your value that will be returned (you may want to investigate the StringBuilder class in System.Text namespace)