VBA Byte Array to String

Question

Apologies if this question has been previously answered, I was unable to find an explanation. I've created a script in VBScript to encrypt an user input and match to an already encrypted password. I ran into some issues along the way and managed to deduce to the following.

I have a byte array (1 to 2) as values (1, 16). I am then defining a string with the value of the array as per below:

Dim bytArr(1 To 2) As Byte
Dim output As String
bytArr(1) = 16
bytArr(2) = 1

output = bytArr
Debug.Print output

The output I get is Ð (Eth) ASCII Value 208. Could someone please explain how the byte array is converted to this character?

JosefZ · Accepted Answer · 2015-11-13 14:41:11Z

1

In VBA, Byte Arrays are special because, unlike arrays of other datatypes, a string can be directly assigned to a byte array. In VBA, Strings are UNICODE strings, so when one assigns a string to a byte array then it stores two digits for each character;
although the glyphs seem to be the same, see charmap:
- Ð is Unicode Character 'LATIN CAPITAL LETTER ETH' (U+00D0) shown in charmap DOS Western (Central) Europe character set (0xD1, i.e. decimal 209);
- Đ is Unicode Character 'LATIN CAPITAL LETTER D WITH STROKE' (U+0110) shown in charmap Windows Western (Central Europe) character set (0xD0, i.e. decimal 208).

Get above statements together keeping in mind endianness (byte order) of the computer architecture: Intel x86 processors use little-endian, so byte array (0x10, 0x01) is the same as unicode string U+0110.

Charaters are amalgamated via flagrant mojibake case. For proof, please use Asc and AscW Functions as follows: Debug.Print output, Asc(output), AscW(output) with different console code pages, e.g. under chcp 852 and chcp 1250.

edited Nov 13, 2015 at 14:41

answered Nov 13, 2015 at 13:09

JosefZ

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Professor Over a year ago

Hi JosefZ, Thanks for the input, however I'm not sure I fully understand. When i run the script as per the above I receive the output from 'output = bytArr' as 208. I assumed this related to the ASCII value and therefore corresponded with the lowercase eth (208) however if I attempted to show the character by altering the script it would show capital letter eth (209). Could you please explain exactly how the array 16, 1 is amalgamated to create the value 208?

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