Question

My junk mail folder has been filling up with messages composed in what appears to be the Cyrillic alphabet. If a message body or a message subject is in Cyrillic, I want to permanently delete it.

On my screen I see Cyrillic characters, but when I iterate through the messages in VBA within Outlook, the ‘Subject’ property of the message returns question marks.

How can I determine if the subject of the message is in Cyrillic characters?

(Note: I have examined the ‘InternetCodepage’ property – it’s usually Western European.)

Answer 1

The String datatype in VB/VBA can handle Unicode characters, but the IDE itself has trouble displaying them (hence the question marks).

I wrote an IsCyrillic function that might help you out. The function takes a single String argument and returns True if the string contains at least one Cyrillic character. I tested this code with Outlook 2007 and it seems to work fine. To test it, I sent myself a few e-mails with Cyrillic text in the subject line and verified that my test code could correctly pick out those e-mails from among everything else in my Inbox.

So, I actually have two code snippets:

• The code that contains the IsCyrillic function. This can be copy-pasted into a new VBA module or added to the code you already have.
• The Test routine I wrote (in Outlook VBA) to test that the code actually works. It demonstrates how to use the IsCyrillic function.

The Code

Option Explicit  Public Const errInvalidArgument = 5  ' Returns True if sText contains at least one Cyrillic character' ' NOTE: Assumes UTF-16 encoding'  Public Function IsCyrillic(ByVal sText As String) As Boolean      Dim i As Long      ' Loop through each char. If we hit a Cryrillic char, return True.'      For i = 1 To Len(sText)          If IsCharCyrillic(Mid(sText, i, 1)) Then             IsCyrillic = True             Exit Function         End If      Next  End Function  ' Returns True if the given character is part of the Cyrillic alphabet' ' NOTE: Assumes UTF-16 encoding'  Private Function IsCharCyrillic(ByVal sChar As String) As Boolean      ' According to the first few Google pages I found, '     ' Cyrillic is stored at U+400-U+52f                '      Const CYRILLIC_START As Integer = &H400     Const CYRILLIC_END  As Integer = &H52F      ' A (valid) single Unicode char will be two bytes long'      If LenB(sChar) <> 2 Then         Err.Raise errInvalidArgument, _             'IsCharCyrillic', _             'sChar must be a single Unicode character'     End If      ' Get Unicode value of character'      Dim nCharCode As Integer     nCharCode = AscW(sChar)      ' Is char code in the range of the Cyrillic characters?'      If (nCharCode >= CYRILLIC_START And nCharCode <= CYRILLIC_END) Then         IsCharCyrillic = True     End If  End Function 

Example Usage

' On my box, this code iterates through my Inbox. On your machine,' ' you may have to switch to your Inbox in Outlook before running this code.' ' I placed this code in `ThisOutlookSession` in the VBA editor. I called' ' it in the Immediate window by typing `ThisOutlookSession.TestIsCyrillic`'  Public Sub TestIsCyrillic()      Dim oItem As Object     Dim oMailItem As MailItem      For Each oItem In ThisOutlookSession.ActiveExplorer.CurrentFolder.Items          If TypeOf oItem Is MailItem Then              Set oMailItem = oItem              If IsCyrillic(oMailItem.Subject) Then                  ' I just printed out the offending subject line '                 ' (it will display as ? marks, but I just       '                 ' wanted to see it output something)            '                 ' In your case, you could change this line to:  '                 '                                               '                 '     oMailItem.Delete                          '                 '                                               '                 ' to actually delete the message                '                  Debug.Print oMailItem.Subject              End If          End If      Next  End Sub