Question

I have the following Visual Basic 6.0 function which writes an ANSI string to a new file over FTP. I would like it to write the file as UTF-16LE. Is there any good way to do that within this following method?

Public Sub writeToFile(ByVal FTPServer As String _
                 , ByVal userName As String _
                 , ByVal password As String _
                 , ByVal contents As String _
                 , ByVal destinationFile As String)

    Dim hFile As Long
    Dim lCount As Long

    inetOpen
    inetConnect FTPServer, userName, password
    hFile = apiFtpOpenFile(m_hFTP, destinationFile, GENERIC_WRITE, FTP_TRANSFER_TYPE_BINARY, 0&)
    If hFile = 0 Then
        Err.Raise EWMFTPErrorCodes.wmFTPSendError, , internetError
    End If

    If apiInternetWriteFile(hFile, contents, Len(contents), lCount) = 0 Then
        Err.Raise EWMFTPErrorCodes.wmFTPSendError, , internetError
    End If

    apiInternetCloseHandle hFile
End Sub

I haven’t done Visual Basic 6.0 in about 10 years, so I’m shaky at best. Any input would be greatly appreciated.

Here is the apiInternetWriteFile declaration;

Private Declare Function apiInternetWriteFile Lib "wininet.dll" Alias "InternetWriteFile" ( _
                         ByVal hFile As Long _
                       , ByVal lpBuffer As String _
                       , ByVal dwNumberOfBytesToWrite As Long _
                       , ByRef lpdwNumberOfBytesWritten As Long) As Long

Answer 1

We need to see the declaration for apiInternetWriteFile. I’m pretty sure it’s a Declare into an API call, maybe something in WinINet.dll. My guess is that you need to:

• Change the Declare so it expects a ByVal Long for the 2nd argument
• EDIT to get a BOM at the start, try Contents = ChrW(&HFEFF&) & Contents. Or possibly FFEF, not sure of the endianness.
• Pass StrPtr(contents) for the 2nd argument
• Pass Len(contents)*2 for the 3rd argument (length in bytes)

That will pass a Unicode UTF-16 string as the contents argument