Trimming spaces - excel

Question

I'm trying to parse left and right empty spaces, nbsp, \n, \t, etc. from all Excel cells in a certain range.
I'm using the following macro:
Sub TRIM_CELLS()
'Clean all conditional formating
Cells.FormatConditions.Delete
'improve performance
Application.ScreenUpdating = False
Dim all_cells_range As String
all_cells_range = "A1:A10"
'Trim all those cells
Range(all_cells_range).Select
For Each cell In Selection.Cells
cell.Value = Application.Substitute(Application.Substitute(CStr(cell.Value), vbLf, vbCr), vbCr, "")
cell = WorksheetFunction.Trim((Application.Clean(Replace(cell.Value, Chr(160), " "))))
Next cell
End Sub
Something like "Maria Tavares " doesn't get trimmed properly.

Answer 1

#Nick: I tried to use your idea and I think the problem is the char itself... Assuming the following loop works as expected I would get the char that is causing the problem.
Take a look at this image:
But nothing gets printed in that place.
Sub TRIM_CELLS()
'Clean all conditional formating
Cells.FormatConditions.Delete
'improve performance
Application.ScreenUpdating = False
Dim all_cells_range As String
all_cells_range = "A1:A2"
'Trim all those cells
Range(all_cells_range).Select
For Each cell In Selection.Cells
For I = 1 To 255
cell = WorksheetFunction.Substitute(cell, Chr(I), I)
Next I
Next cell
End Sub

Answer 2

I use a function that removes any special characters that you define.
Function RemoveSpecialCharacters(wks As Worksheet, strRange As String, var As Variant)
Dim rngAddress As Range, cell As Range, I&
'e.g strRange - "E2:E"
With wks
Set rngAddress = .Range(strRange & .Cells(Rows.count, "A").End(xlUp).row)
For I = LBound(var) To UBound(var)
For Each cell In rngAddress
cell = WorksheetFunction.Substitute(cell, var(I), " ")
Else
cell = WorksheetFunction.Substitute(cell, var(I), "")
Next cell
Next I
End With
End Function
You could call the function like this:
RemoveSpecialCharacters worksheetname, "A1:A", Array(Chr(9), Chr(10), Chr(13), Chr(39))
Where Chr(10) is linefeed character, chr(9) is the tab character etc.
See this link for what other Chr codes stand for.
UPDATE:
Try this to remove the weird "spy" character from the cell.
RemoveSpecialCharacters worksheetname, "A1:A", Array(Chr(160))

Answer 3

Ended up doing a replacement with that "space"... not a great solution but fixed my problem... Just would like to know what char it was...
Sub TRIM_CELLS()
'Clean all conditional formating
Cells.FormatConditions.Delete
'improve performance
Application.ScreenUpdating = False
Dim all_cells_range As String
all_cells_range = "A1:A2"
Range(all_cells_range).Select
For Each cell In Selection.Cells
cell.Replace What:=" ", Replacement:=" ", LookAt:=xlPart, _
SearchOrder:=xlByRows, MatchCase:=False, SearchFormat:=False, _
ReplaceFormat:=False
cell.Value = Application.Substitute(Application.Substitute(CStr(cell.Value), vbLf, vbCr), vbCr, "")
cell.Value = WorksheetFunction.Trim(cell)
Next cell
end sub