ACC: Irregular Characters in Attached dBASE IV Memo Field

• Microsoft Access versions 1.0, 1.1, 2.0

SYMPTOMS

Moderate: Requires basic macro, coding, and interoperability skills.

If you have an attached dBASE IV table with a Memo field, a strange character resembling an "i" (ASCII 161) appears randomly throughout the Memo field when you view it in Microsoft Access.

CAUSE

This is a result of the way dBASE IV handles its Memo fields and how this translates when you view the Memo field in Microsoft Access.

When you open a Memo field in dBASE IV, you are presented with an editor that is fixed at 65 characters per line and that cannot be adjusted. In order to format your Memo data so that it fits comfortably in the memo editor, dBASE IV inserts invisible characters that act as carriage returns. These characters become an actual part of the data in the .DBF file. Microsoft Access does not use these characters to format the Memo data because the size of a Memo field is adjustable. These characters are ignored and consequently appear in the Memo field on your form.

RESOLUTION

You can create an Access Basic procedure to remove these characters from the Memo field. The procedure should go through each record in the table and copy the Memo field, character by character, to a temporary holding area, ignoring all instances of Chr(161). The procedure should then copy the corrected string back into the Memo field.

STATUS

This behavior is by design.

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