Excel invisible question mark - excel

Question

I have an extracted information from a system into an Excel file.
The names "Leone" seem the same but Excel recognize it differently.
Leone
​Leone
The length of the string is not the same, and if I check the value with VBA an invisible ? is the first character.
Could you help me how to get rid of the invisible characters?

Answer 1

To get rid of all invisible ? you may try this.
Sub CleanUnicode()
Dim n As Long, strClean As String, strChr As String
Dim ws As Worksheet
Set ws = ThisWorkbook.Sheets("Sheet3") 'change Sheet3 to data sheet
For Each cel In ws.Range("A1:A10") 'change A1:A10 to working range
strClean = cel.Value
For n = Len(strClean) To 1 Step -1
strChr = Mid(strClean, n, 1)
If AscW(strChr) = 8203 Then '? is unicode character 8203
strClean = Replace(strClean, strChr, "")
End If
Next
cel.Value = WorksheetFunction.Trim(strClean)
Next cel
End Sub
Instead of If AscW(strChr) = 8203 Then you can also use If AscW(strChr) > 255 Then.
EDIT 1 : As per the suggestion of #YowE3K. Assuming you only have Unicode 8203 in cells to be replaced.
Sub CleanUnicode()
Dim n As Long, strClean As String, strChr As String
Dim ws As Worksheet
Set ws = ThisWorkbook.Sheets("Sheet3") 'change Sheet3 to data sheet
For Each cel In ws.Range("A1:A10") 'change A1:A10 to working range
cel.Value = Replace(cel.Value, ChrW(8203), "")
Next cel
End Sub
Got this from here.

Answer 2

In general this is strange - this is how chrome renders the HTML from the question:
This is a workaround, that checks the characters of the string and builds a new one if one of them is equal to 63. Pretty much like a simple replace function:
Public Function removeInvisible(rngRange As Range) As String
Dim cnt As Long
For cnt = 1 To Len(rngRange)
If AscW(Mid(rngRange, cnt, 1)) <> 8203 Then
removeInvisible = removeInvisible & Mid(rngRange, cnt, 1)
End If
Next cnt
End Function

Answer 3

If the text has come from a copy/paste it might have taken in some other non printable characters.
These might be displayed in the VBA editor as ? which is often the way that unicode characters are rendered when the font does not support them.
I would try the formula
=CODE(LEFT(A3,1)) in one of the cells to see what the Unicode code point of the invisible character was.
If it turns out to be a non ascii chat then you could write a macro to strip out the characters that are problematic based on their code values.

Answer 4

To remove multiple occurrences of non-ascii characters from all cells of your range you can use this.
Option Explicit
Sub test()
Dim regEx As Object
Dim temparray() As String
Dim myrange As Range
Dim lrow As Long
Dim lcol As Long
Dim counter As Long
Dim i As Long
Dim j As Long
Set regEx = CreateObject("vbscript.regexp")
With regEx
.Pattern = "[^\u0000-\u007F]"
.MultiLine = False
.Global = True
.IgnoreCase = False
End With
'set your last row and column
lrow = 5
lcol = 5
ReDim temparray(1 To lrow, 1 To lcol)
Set myrange = Sheets("Sheet1").Range(Cells(1, 1), Cells(lrow, lcol))
Application.ScreenUpdating = False
counter = 0
For i = 1 To lrow
For j = 1 To lcol
temparray(i, j) = regEx.Replace(myrange.Cells(i, j).Value, "")
counter = counter + 1
Next j
Next i
myrange.Value = temparray
Application.ScreenUpdating = True
End Sub