Two apparently identical strings not registering as equal in Excel VBA

Hi everybody.

My first post, so be nice to me!

I'm struggling with a problem with some VBA I've written. I have a list of data in a Word table column, and a similar list of data in an Excel spreadsheet row. I'm trying to cycle through the two sets of data, and do various tasks when a match is found. My Excel VBA code looks like this:

aString = objDoc.Tables(1).Cell(aCount, 2)
bString = Sheets("Stuff").Cells(2, bCount).Value

If aString = bString Then

...etc

The problem is that it never returns any matches. I've put message boxes in to check, and even when the two strings look the same, it isn't being picked up by the If...Then statement. Everything else seems to be working fine - Excel is controlling Word properly and the data is being pulled out correctly etc. I've seen similar threads on this forum where people have had issues with spaces - I'm pretty sure that's not the case here. I've tried using 'Trim' on each string, and I've also checked in cases where there are only single words in the data - same problem.


Am I missing something? Very grateful for any help. Thanks

Hello again - already tried TRIM, same result.

Hi - yep, they are perfect matches. I've just gone in to the data and forced two of the cells to just be the letter 'a', to keep it really simple. Same result. Most perplexing...

dflak - thanks for the reply. That's a really handy bit of code - I'll be keeping that. I don't think it's an ASCII issue, as I said in my reply to mikeTRON above, I have been in to the data and forced it to be the same, without success. That said, I'll give it a go, since I've exhausted everything else. The Word document is actually generated by another part of the Excel spreadsheet - I wondered if it might be something to do with the way that it transfers from Excel into Word. I'll let you know how I get on.

Interesting...I used your ASCII tool and it showed a carriage return and 007 (Bell) character on every Word table cell, but not the Excel. Would that be enough to cause the issue?

Thanks for all the replies. I ended up designing an alternative solution, where I compared the data that ended up in the Word document while it was still resident in Excel, and then found it in the Word table. This seemed to work well, and also avoided another issue that I had set myself up for. Really useful replies though - I never realised so many hidden ASCII characters were out there. Until the next time...