Avoid extra "carriage return" in Print statement with Visual Basic?

Question

With Visual Basic, I'm confused with that the behavior of Print statement in that sometimes the following statement: would cause additional carriage return "^M" at the end of a line, but sometimes, it doesn't. I wondering why?

filePath = "d:\tmp\FAE-IMM-Report-2012-Week.org"
    If Dir(filePath) <> "" Then
        Kill filePath
    End If
    outFile = FreeFile()
    Open filePath For Output As outFile
    Print #outFile, "#+TITLE:     Weekly Report"

would produce

#+TITLE:     Weekly Report^M

while I wish without ^M:

#+TITLE:     Weekly Report

In one test program, almost the same code would produce no "^M".

Please help! Thanks a lot.

Upon further experiment, I found that the following suggestion using vbNewline and ";" at the end of print content, still does not solve my problem.

After careful isolation, I found the cause of the problem is an character that seems like a space, not exactly space, followed by newline and carriage return. Before printing the text containing the offending string, there was no carriage return, but once the offending line is printed, then every line including the previous line printed would have carriage return.

I'm not sure what the exact the offending string is as my skill of VBA is not yet too well.

Here is a copy of the offending text from a spreadsheet cell:

   "There is something invisible after this visible text 
After the invisible text, then there might be a carriage return $Chr(13) and/or newline"

I'm not sure if the paste to web browser would preserve the content, though. By pasting to emacs, I did not see carriage return, while emacs should display it, if there is one. So I guess that there is no carriage return in the offending string.

Below is the program demonstrate the problem:

    Sub DemoCarriageReturnWillAppear()
    Dim filePath As String
    Dim outFile
    Dim offendingText
    filePath = "d:\tmp\demoCarriageReturn.org"
    If Dir(filePath) <> "" Then
        Kill filePath
    End If
    outFile = FreeFile()
    Open filePath For Output As outFile
    Print #outFile, "#+AUTHOR:    Yu Shen" & vbNewLine;
    Close #outFile 'At this moment, there is no carriage return
    Open filePath For Append As outFile
    offendingText = ThisWorkbook.Worksheets("Sheet1").Range("A1")
    Print #outFile, offendingText & vbNewLine;
    Close #outFile 'Now, every line end has carriage return.
    'It must be caused by something offending at the above print out content.
End Sub

Here is the final result of the above procedure:

    #+AUTHOR:    Yu Shen^M

There is something invisible after this visible text 
After the invisible text, then there might be a carriage return $Chr(13) or newline^M

Note the above "^M" is added by me, as carriage return would not be visible in browser.

If you're interested, I can send you the excel file with the offending content.

I need your help on how to avoid those offending string, or the carriage returns. (I even try to do string Replace of the carriage return or new line, as I found that once I manually deleted whatever caused change to another line, the problem would be gone. But calling Replace to replace vbNewline, Chr$(13), or vbCrLf did not make any difference.

Thanks for your further help!

Yu

Answer 1

Use a trailing semicolon to surpress the new line:

Print #outFile, "#+TITLE:     Weekly Report";
                                            ^
                                            ^

The VB Editor will often add a semicolon if you make a mistake in the statement which could explain why the new line is sometimes output and sometimes not.

New diagnostic routine

We need to know the character within cell A1 that is causing the problem.

Place the following subroutine within one of your modules.

Public Sub DsplInHex(Stg As String)

  Dim Pos As Long

  For Pos = 1 To Len(Stg)
    Debug.Print Hex(AscW(Mid(Stg, Pos, 1))) & " ";
  Next
  Debug.Print

End Sub

Go to VB Editor's Immediate window and type in the following text following by Return:

DsplInHex(Sheets("Sheet1").range("A1"))

Underneath this line, you should see something like 54 65 73 74 31. This is a list of the code value of each character in the cell. I expect we will see A, the code for line feed, or D, the code for carriage return, at the end of the list.

Position the cursor in cell A1. Click F2 to select edit then Backspace to delete the invisible trailing character then Return to end the edit. Go back to the Immediate Window, position the cursor to the end of DsplInHex(Sheets("Sheet1").range("A1")) and click Return. The trailing character should have gone.

Try that and report back. Good luck.