Question

The below lines does not write anything to the file, ascii.txt. Trying to write the ascii equivalent of hex “88”. However nothing is written to the file, nor nothing is asssigned to the variable, ascii.

Dim ascii = ChrW(Convert.ToInt32("88", 16))
My.Computer.FileSystem.WriteAllText("e:\ascii.txt", ascii, True)

In excel or openoffice, you can get the ascii equivalent using the below formula. What is wrong with the code?

=CHAR(HEX2DEC("88"))

Answer 1

ChrW doesn’t know ASCII, it only knows Unicode code points.

U+0088 is a control character, it’s non-printable (i.e. it doesn’t normally correspond to a displayable character). It’s therefore not surprising that the file appears empty.

Furthermore, even ChrW worked with ASCII, the character 0x88 is not ASCII, it’s outside its range. In case you were talking about the former standard Windows character set, codepage 1252, you can use the following code to retrieve the string representation of the character code:

Dim bytes = New Byte() { &H88 }
Dim text = System.Text.Encoding.GetEncoding(1252).GetString(bytes)