VBA String Literals - Escaping, non-printable characters and line-continuations Using VBA string constants
Example
VBA defines a number of string constants for special characters like:
- vbCr : Carriage-Return 'Same as "\r" in C style languages.
- vbLf : Line-Feed 'Same as "\n" in C style languages.
- vbCrLf : Carriage-Return & Line-Feed (a new-line in Windows)
- vbTab: Tab Character
- vbNullString: an empty string, like ""
You can use these constants with concatenation and other string functions to build string-literals with special-characters.
Debug.Print "Hello " & vbCrLf & "World"
'Output:
'Hello
'World
Debug.Print vbTab & "Hello" & vbTab & "World"
'Output:
' Hello World
Dim EmptyString As String
EmptyString = vbNullString
Debug.Print EmptyString = ""
'Output:
'True
Using vbNullString is considered better practice than the equivalent value of "" due to differences in how the code is compiled. Strings are accessed via a pointer to an allocated area of memory, and the VBA compiler is smart enough to use a null pointer to represent vbNullString. The literal "" is allocated memory as if it were a String typed Variant, making the use of the constant much more efficient:
Debug.Print StrPtr(vbNullString) 'Prints 0.
Debug.Print StrPtr("") 'Prints a memory address.
