Hello (the rest of the) World – reading data in other languages

Have you ever opened a text file in Excel and found that the characters looked weird or corrupted? The Wikipedia entry for mojibake says ‘In German, Buchstabensalat (“letter salad”) is a common term for this phenomenon, and in Spanish, deformación (literally deformation).’

This is one of a series of blog posts on file handling in VBA to cope with Unicode file names and contents. Part 1 was posted on Sep 28 2020, about reading text from Unicode files. The articles should provide all the Excel VBA code you need for working with Unicode folder and file names in the Windows file system, reading unstructured Unicode text, and structured text file data queries.

This post is the code for using the Filesystem object to replace the old VB functions like Dir(), Filelen(), FileDateTime(), etc, that do not work with Unicode file names. FileSystem.bas is the module which you can import into your project, and the CSV file is a sample downloaded from opengov.gr.

Code module: FileSystem.bas   Sample file: Σχόλιο UTF-8 BOM.csv

Old VB	Function
Curdir	GetCurDir
	ChPath
ChDir	SetCurDir
	NewFSO
	GetFSOFile
Dir	FileExists
Dir( file,vbDirectory)	FolderExists
	GetPathAndName
FileLen	FileSize
FileDateTime	FileDateModified
FileCopy	CopyFile
Name..As	RenameFile
Kill	DeleteFile
	GetTempName
	GetTempFullName
	GetFSOFolder
MkDir	CreateFolder
RmDir	DeleteFolder
Attr	GetFileAttributes
SetAttr	SetFileAttributes
	FileAttrString
	GetOpenFilenameStr

Let me know of any improvements you can suggest.