Converting Unicode escaped characters (\u#### format) into UTF-8 in VBA?

Question

I would like to convert the special characters in "text" variable back normal in VBA!

    Dim text As String
    text = "Cs\u00fct\u00f6rt\u00f6k" 
    text = Encoding.utf8.GetString(Encoding.ASCII.GetBytes(text)) 
    MsgBox text 
    'Csütörtök would be the correct result

But in the above code Excel 2013 gives me an error about "Encoding" method.. cant parse it.

It should be working just like this online converter if you put in the text value: http://www.rapidmonkey.com/unicodeconverter/reverse.jsp

Is there any good solution for this problem? A one-line code maybe? Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

The Encoding class does not decode escape sequences, you have to do that manually by parsing the string yourself. For that matter, VB strings use UTF-16, so you do not need to use the Encoding class at all. Simply replace characters 2-7 ("\u00fc") with a single &H00FC character, replace characters 9-14 ("\u00f6") with a single &H00F6 character, etc and then you are done. Each \uXXXX sequence represents a single Unicode codepoint.