Userform Input Small hyphen & Long hyphen? (✱Using symbols in Excel) - excel

Question

I am entering a string in a Userform in Excel-VBA from the user side of the form. I would want to know how to enter the Long Hyphen.
The Small Hyphen would be Shift + - the (the minus sign button next to 0).
How would you enter the Long Hyphen on the form as I am doing a string match in my VBA code on the back-end? It can be entered with Alt+0150, but is there another simpler way?
If the option of entering the Long Hyphen doesn't work then I will handle this value on the back-end through a find and replace method or something in VBA.

Answer 1

👆 There is only one "Hyphen"...    It's part of a ᖴᗩᗰᎥᒪƳ ᴏғ ᑕᕼᗩᖇᗩᑕ丅ᗴᖇᔕ called Dashes.
Examples:
Hyphen [-] (-)
Minus sign [−] (−)
En dash [–] (–)
Em dash [—] (—)
✱ Your browser might render them differently, but the fonts above are supposed to be [Consolas or Courier 13px] and (Arial or Helvetica 15px). While they all kind of look the same in this font, those are four different characters.
The characters can be copy/pasted directly from here - − – — into Excel (but not to the the VBA Editor), or can be produced along with 136,686 other Unicode characters, either:
with a worksheet formula, using the ᴜɴɪᴄʜᴀʀ function:
=UNICHAR(9733) 'produces a [★] star character.
programmatically with VBA, using the ChrW function:
Range("A1") = ChrW(9743) 'puts a wee [☏] rotary phone in cell A1.
More about dashes —
What they are
How to use them
"Stealing" Unicode characters from websites
There are all sorts of handy Unicode symbols — so many that it can be hard to find "just" the right one.
However you can (and will!) find other Unicode symbols on web pages that you want to use programmatically. All you need is the symbol's code, which can be determined easily:
Copy/paste the symbol from your browser (being careful to copy only the single character; no spaces, etc.) into a cell in Excel
then, go to VBA's Immediate Window ( AltF11→CtrlG ), type:
MsgBox AscW([a1])
...(Where A1 is the cell with the character). Hit Enter, and the character's Unicode code will display.
You could also use Windows' built-in Character Map utility, or one of many third-party browser plug-ins. You can even paste a symbol directly into Google to learn more about it:
Finally, no discussion on the topic of Unicode would be complete without links to:
  👉  The Unicode Consortium (unicode.org) and,
  👉  “ȶɦɛ 𝓒𝓸𝓸𝓵 𝕱𝖆𝖓𝖈𝖞 Ⓣⓔⓧⓣ 𝔾𝕖𝕟𝕖𝕣𝕒𝕥𝕠𝕣”  (Yes, those are all plain text characters.)
...and if you're looking for a unique gift, or just want your name to go down in history for something that really matters, you can even adopt a Unicode character, starting at $100 ᴜsᴅ!
Special thanks to Vinton Cerf for adopting the Unicode Leonard Nimoy's "Live Long and Prosper" symbol.
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