Weird characters when appending Memo field

[ppataki]

Dear All,

When I use an append query on my table that contains a Memo type field I get these characters
ꌎ
in some of the cells of the Memo type field....weird

Could you please advise?

Many thanks!

 

[MSAccessRookie]

Dear All,

When I use an append query on my table that contains a Memo type field I get these characters
ꌎ
in some of the cells of the Memo type field....weird

Could you please advise?

Many thanks!

The strange characters are likely the result of Access encountering characters in the string that are not part of the standard printable ASCII character set (32-126). The most common reason that I have encountered for this is embedded line breaks like the CR and LF that are inserted when you use vbCrLf in a VB Module. The same characters can also be added while editing a field by pressing Ctrl/Enter while inside the field.

 

[Dennisk]

usually these are CR or CR/LF

 

[dkinley]

There are lots of articles that talk about memo fields and how they are easily corruptible. For your specific issue, here is a link that may help ....

http://www.utteraccess.com/forums/printthread.php?Cat=&Board=95&main=768619&type=thread

About midway down is a 5-step process that a person took to alleviate this issue.

-dK

 

[ppataki]

Strange thing that those cells in the Memo field are empty! And when I append them to another table then the strange characters appear....

 

[dkinley]

usually these are CR or CR/LF

I would agree with this and originally started down this line of thinking, but I thought this was more prevalent in exporting to something like Excel. Whereas Excel only has a, I think, LF, a memo field uses CR/LF so the leftover character would show up as a square in the export.

I talked myself out of this line of thinking because the user is an append query and I assumed from one memo field to another memo field - therefore an excess character should not be an issue.

-dK

 

[ppataki]

I found the solution and it works fine!!!!

There are 2 solutions:

- change Group by to First in the query or
- use a Left function: Left([memo field],10000)

 

[dkinley]

Alright!

Thanks for posting the solution especially for the strange behaviours that memo fields like to exhibit.

-dK